Maria Mermin (b. 1939, France) is a French-born fiber artist whose life and work trace the threads of migration, motherhood, and material memory. The daughter of a Ukrainian weaver and basket maker, Mermin grew up surrounded by texture and craft, though life on a busy farm left little time for her to learn those traditions herself. At twenty, she immigrated to San Francisco, California—a leap that began a life woven between continents, families, and creative pursuits.

Her artistic journey began unexpectedly: a chance encounter with a knitting shop in her San Francisco neighborhood sparked her lifelong fascination with yarn and texture. What began as knitting dresses and sweaters soon evolved into a passion for weaving. While traveling across Europe and the Middle East with her husband, she studied the mechanics of weaving in Ein Hod, Israel—an artists’ colony whose looms, textures, and colors transformed her understanding of fiber as a language of form and emotion.

Back in California, Mermin pursued graduate studies at the University of California, Berkeley, under the mentorship of textile pioneer Ed Rossbach and stained glass artist Narcissus Quagliata. Their influence expanded her sense of structure, color, and material experimentation—elements that continue to define her large-scale fiber wall sculptures.

Now based in Carson City, Nevada, Mermin creates vivid fiber compositions that blend traditional techniques with improvisational freedom. Her large format works—often eight feet high and made from secondhand wool, yarn, rope, beads, and found objects—embody both environmental mindfulness and a deep personal narrative. Each piece is a tactile meditation on loss, resilience, and renewal.

During the COVID-19 lockdowns, Mermin returned to weaving with her daughter, who devised an off-loom setup on the family’s sliding doors, allowing her to work on a grander scale. This period of enforced stillness and reflection reignited Mermin’s creative spirit, producing a body of work that fuses domestic intimacy with monumental form.

Her recent exhibition, Fiber Wall Sculptures: Stories Bound in Twist & Stitch, showcased these works—textural landscapes of color, emotion, and memory. As Mermin describes it, her art is “healing”—a dialogue between grief and beauty, between the materials she rescues and the stories she reimagines through them.

Now in her mid-eighties, Maria Mermin continues to create with a sense of play, reverence, and rebellion against rigidity. Each thread she ties is both personal history and public offering—a testament to how the act of making can transform life’s fragments into something whole, luminous, and alive.