GODDESS EMBROIDERIES OF EASTERN EUROPE
Mary B. Kelly
ISBN# 0966892917 /092902124x Originally published, 1989 by Northland Press. Reprinted by STUDIOBOOKS, 1996. 200 pages, over 200 illustrations, 50 black and white photographs, 8 color photographs. 8 chapters, Bibliography. Softcover.
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Description: Remnants of ancient goddess beliefs were very much a part of nineteenth century Eastern European folk culture. Even up to the twentieth century, women there supervised rituals in honor of the goddess and carefully embroidered her image on their ritual cloths and clothing. Today the strong powerful goddess figure can still be seen on many examples of Eastern European folk art. The author brings these figures to our attention, introduces the folklife from which they sprang and explains changes in the goddess motif and its meanings.
She unfolds rich examples of textile collections in Russia, Ukraine and Yugoslavia. She describes folk art from Romania and Poland and relates some of her conversations with folk artists in the former Czechoslovakia. She even shows examples of goddess embroideries here in the United States from museum and permanent collections. Kelly weaves a tale of her search for the goddess Berehinia and her reseach on why goddess embroideries exist in Eastern Europe.
Author's Biography: For more than 25 years, artist and professor Mary B. Kelly has been traveling to Eastern Europe, documenting the techniques of folk embroidery and weaving and researching the origins of their motifs. A graduate of St. Mary of the Woods College, Rhode Island School of Design and Syracuse University, she has had many one person painting shows, lectured at universities, published articles in textile magazines and journals on Eastern European folk art and published a number of books on the embroidery of Central and Eastern Europe, the Balkans and Greek textiles.
Reviews: " Embroidery is thought to be even more ancient than literature and a perfect medium for preserving visual motifs... GODDESS EMBROIDERIES offers woonderful source material, exciting information and agreat tale of research and discovery." Feminist Bookstore News , July/August, 1991.
"Mary Kelly's great contribution is to have brought the artist's skills of visual perception to bear upon a mass of materials and with the aid of considerable ethnographic knowledge, to have made us all "see" the goddess." Dianne E. Farrell in SIGNS, Autumn, 1991.
From a reader... Dear Dr. Kelly,
I recently found your book Goddess Embroideries of Eastern Europe on Amazon. I was impressed by your scholarship and blown away by the designs. The pictures in your book were something I have been seeking for a lifetime and couldn't even put a name to. The Rumanian images of a Paleolithic cave art goddess next to the same symbol on a19th Century beaded purse moved me to tears at their silent testament to the incredible fortitude of Her worshippers and the enduring power of Her love. My husband and I create Pagan jewelry. We're frustrated by the limited pool for Pagan designs of European origin and your book was just what we were looking for. We've almost had fights over who got to look at this book! Debbie at www.brigidsforge.com
An Amazon reader gives this book five stars.
By Larissa Boiwka - See all my reviews
This book is a great resource for students of anthropology as well as artists and craftspeople. Includes extensive amounts of information on hard to find topics such as the pagan spiritual implications of specific design motifs and their relevance to seasonal rituals. Artists would find that these motifs, while traditional to textiles, would translate nicely to number of mediums.
Kelly discusses at length several Slavic goddesses rarely (if ever) mentioned by books considered to be in the "canon" of mythology. One can more easily find literature on gods such as Perun, and so it is nice to finally see more attention given to the "divine feminine" of the Slavs.
GODDESS EMBROIDERIES OF THE BALKAN LANDS
AND THE GREEK ISLANDS Mary B. Kelly
ISBN# 096892909Published by STUDIOBOOKS, 1999.
200 pages, 8 chapters, 100 illustrations, 13 color photographs, Tables, Maps, Bibliography, Softbound.Price: $30.00 postpaid.
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Description: Linked by the Black and the Aegean seas, the lands of Ukraine, Romania, Bulgaria and Greece are also united by their strong ritual and embroidery traditions. In a similar format to her earlier book Goddess Embroideries of Eastern Europe, the author recounts Bulgarian women's folk rituals and links them to the goddess motoifs on their textiles. She diplays nineteenth century Carpathian motiofs and documents their survival today in mountain villages.
Traveling south, she visits the Greek mainland and islands, studying the survivals of pagan culture and the folk motifs on ritual cloths and clothing. Techniques of embroidery and weaving, distinctive colors and patterns, the origins of rituals and textile traditions, as well as the motifs on cloth; all these interest the author in her quest for goddess images. Interviews with informants provide links as Kelly weaves these elements into the story of women's age-old textile traditions. in the Greek and Balkan world.
Author's Biography: For more than 25 years, artist and professor Mary B. Kelly has researched the motifs of goddess figures on Central and Eastern European textiles. Drawing on these experiences, she broadens her field of interest to the south, documenting similar motifs in the Balkans and in Greece. A graduate of Rhode Island School of Design and Syracuse University where she holds an M.F.A. degree, Kelly has lectured and exhibited widely, published articles in professional and textile magazines such as Piecework, FiberArts and Threads. She is the author of a series of Embroidery books about Russia, Ukraine, Slovakia and Greece, and her writing is also included in Russia-Women-Culture, 1996 ed. B. Holmgren and H. Goscillo and Folk Dress in Europe and Anatolia: Beliefs about Protection and Fertility 1999, ed. L. Welters.
Reviews: "In this incredible new book, Mary B. Kelly continues her exploration of the embroidered goddess images she first presented to us in her first book, Goddess Embroideries of Eastern Europe. In her earlier work she began her quest for the figures and motifs inspired by the Russian Goddess Berehinia. In this volume...Kelly describes in fascinating detail many of the rituals in which embroidered cloths are used and the meanings of the positions of the figures on the textiles. This is a beautiful, well-researched, intensly interesting book that I highly recommend to all students of the history of the Goddess...it will be a joy as well, for all craft and needlework historians." Carol Arnold in The Beltane Papers, Issue 18, May, 1999.
"I am flooded with respect, wonder and delight for what Mary Kelly has wrought in this, her second book on Goddess Embroideries. .. I have always appreciated the skill nd beauty of women's embroidery work but Mary's book broadened my vision to see another world within the patterns themselves. Not only is this book a feast for the eyes with over 100 drawings and illustrations, as well as ten exquisite color photographs spread throughout its pages, but it is also a superb testimony to the courgeous, complex and creative lives of the women of Bulgaria, Romania, the Carpathian mountains, the Greek islands and the mysterious Vlach culture.
One of the most important contributions of Mary's work is establishing the connection between Goddess motifs found on embroidered and woven textiles and their ritual context in prehistoric and contemporary times... throughout her text, Mary describes in intriguing details the many ways that embroidered textiles are central to the ritual life of the community...
Reading Goddess Embroideries of The Balkan Lands and the Greek Islands is a marvelous way to begin one's personal discovery of this rich material."
Louise Pare in Goddessing Regenerated, Summer, 2000 Pg. 38.
The final volume in the trilogy on Goddess
Embroideries and folk textiles, this book
presents the story of change and migration
in prehistory and in our own era in countries
bordering the Arctic Circle. in Siberia, along the Silk Road and up the great rivers of Eastern Europe, migrants moved west carrying with them folk beliefs and symbols on ritual textiles to their new homes in the northlands of European Russia, the Baltics and Scandinavia.
Searching for meaning in pre-literate symbol systems found primarily on textiles, the author highlights folk dress and folk customs influenced by these changes. Using interviews, descriptions of collections, travel anecdotes and many illustrations and photographs, Kelly makes a persuasive case for motifs in migration from the mountains of the Altai in Siberia to the mountains of Norway. Focusing on their origin, transmission, and usage across the north, she describes their symbolic meaning, the rites in which they were used and their significance and longevity in Siberia, the ObUgrian areas, central Asia and the Volga republics of Chuvashia, Mari El and Mordvinia. She continues north to Karelia and visits ths Sami before reaching the Baltics, Finland and finally, Sweden and Norway.
ISBN# 978 - 0 9668929 - 4 - 9
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360 pages, over 200 illustrations and black and white photographs, 30 color photographs, Bibliography, maps, Index of symbols.
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