"By transferring Persian stories into quilts, I adjusted from a place that isn't here to a place that is here."

On a cold Friday morning in February, I knocked on Amineh Mahallati's door. She opened the door and welcomed me with a smile and a direct gaze with her large brown eyes. I carefully looked at her slender frame, clad in a light gray sweater and a teal skirt. Something was missing: Amineh was not wearing a “hejab,” the traditional Muslim headscarf. Then I realized she was at home. And home meant bare feet and unbound hair.

We sat in the living room, a spacious area decorated with beige carpeting and white walls. The center of the room dipped down to a lower plateau. I sat on one of the sofas embedded in the side of the depression and placed my feet gingerly on the carpet, inches away from the red and gray flowered rug. I had forgotten to remove my shoes. Amineh sat on the steps and faced me, her slight figure backgrounded by three wall hangings -- her creations.

The work in the center, a quilt, spanned a third of the wall. A three-inch border decorated with the thin, scalloped script of Farsi, the language of Iran, lined the edges of the quilt. These words tell the story of a childless couple, a king and a queen, who seek the help of an old man to solve their problem. The old man gives the queen an apple; she eats it and then bears a son. To protect his life, the son must wear a blade tied to his body. At the tale's end, the son slays a demon to rescue a princess.

This was one of the fairy tales that Fatume, Amineh's childhood nanny, told Amineh to relieve Amineh's grief over the death of her cousin.

"I was so lonely at that moment and she comforted me. This particular quilt gives me the same feelings of comfort and security I had when I listened to my nanny's stories."

Coping with loneliness and solitude was but one of Amineh's challenges when she settled in Princeton seventeen years ago. In addition to adapting to American culture, she also had to adjust to her role as the spouse of a tenure-track Princeton University professor.

"By transferring Persian stories into quilts, I adjusted from a place that isn't here to a place that is here."

Although she had travelled to Europe and the Middle East as a child with her father, a well-respected academic in Iran, Amineh felt displaced in Princeton. She missed her hometown, Shiraz, located in southern Iran, a town known for its rose gardens and poetry. Most of all, she missed her family; especially the artistic exuberance of her mother who upholstered their home furnishings and created apparel of her own design. To counter her homesickness during the first several years in Princeton, Amineh created quilts and textile art pieces based on childhood stories.

"I believe my loneliness somehow drew me to my memories of her. I felt more comfortable working with fabric. It was as if she was here with me." But her mother had a different reason for her creations.

"We had a very social life in Iran. Sewing helped my mother cope with the pressure from the outside. It was the only way that she could say, 'Don't bother me.' [The behavior of women in Persian culture] is completely different from here."

"My mother was an artist. When she looked at some textiles, she could clearly find the perfect match for her idea. When she was sewing, I watched her; and without speaking, we passed these messages. Now I realize whatever I am doing is somehow related to her."

She noted that American culture had, however, influenced her choice of expression: quilts. When Amineh showed me the patchwork quilt she had made with her children, she said that the pieces were like the pages of a diary.

Because Amineh's artistry arose from her need to create a sense of the familiar, most of the work displayed in her home seem like a chronicle of her life.

For instance, her only abstract creation was a pink and white wall hanging to express her frustration with her first pregnancy. To create the tasseled bottom of the piece, she loosened the tightly-woven threads of the cloth inch by inch and in the process, released her own tension at the same time.

The majority of her quilts and textile art depict Persian folk tales. And for the most part, she recreates fairy tales with strong woman figures.

Her most recent quilt, a red-crested crane, portrays the story of a woman who transforms into a crane and creates fabric from her blood and feathers for her husband on the condition that he does not look at her when she is creating the cloth. The husband disobeys her warning and she disappears.

This piece hung in her living room, to the right of the large quilt telling the story of the childless royal couple. On the left side of the quilt was a triptych describing a story told by her aunt -- the same tale that was told to her mother when she was a young child.

"There was a prince whose father had arranged his marriage. The prince sent his servant with an apple and a pair of shoes to give to the bride. The servant disobeyed his orders, took a large bite of the apple and stretched out the shoes. The prince thought he had married a terrible woman and so he never looked at his wife. But the wife tried to change his mind by catching his attention. He walked through yellow, white and red rose gardens and each time he fell in love with the same woman -- his wife. In the red rose garden, she cut her hand while slicing an apple. He gave her his handkerchief. Later that night, he saw her hand and recognized her voice, the same voice which had recited beautiful poetry to him in those gardens."

For this piece, Amineh had connected the plywood boards with metals hinges she had hewn by hand. She worked until two a.m. to finish the piece. Later that morning, she received a phone call from her brother from Iran: the aunt who had told the tale of the disillusioned prince had passed away. Amineh dedicated the triptych to her aunt.

All of Amineh's works are created in her home. She apologetically invited me to her studio.

"It is nothing special. Just a small room."

The small room has a sewing machine and a desk with ample space. On top of the desk lies a square pillowcase cover. The ILEX Foundation, a Boston-based oganzation that promotes cultural exchange between the U.S. and the Middle East, had commissioned Amineh to decorate cushion covers with a Greek design.

Since the death of a friend's father in 1992, Amineh decided that she was ready to sell her work.

"I wanted my friend to look at the fabric of the quilt that I had made and remember her father. At that time, I was thinking, 'I am ready [to produce commercial art].'"

In the mid-1980s, when she was a student and a young mother at the College of New Jersey, she created a piece depicting seven women.

"These are women from around the world. They have mirrors to represent their faces because I feel we have common things together -- womenhood. I feel that we have a common inner voice -- the same voice that I hear when I read novels."

Perhaps Amineh's sense of the universal echoes her own outlook on life -- to accept situations without too much analysis. When I asked Amineh about her self portrait, a watercolor drawing of a woman with a bird's head, she cannot tell me why she drew a bird's head.

Now Amineh works on her art at home while her children attend school. She is also a graduate student in textile art and surface design at Montclair State College.

"I struggle when I choose fabric. So in most of my works, I design my own fabrics. At Montclair, I hope to be exposed to the magical world of fabrics." Amineh's magical regard of humanity and fabrics results in a unique artistic creation uniting American and Persian cultures. As an artist, she is particularly grateful for the opportunities she has to develop her work: "I have the freedom of choosing. I'm thankful for having this pleasure to choose what I want to do."

Amineh Mahallati may be contacted at:
aminehm@yahoo.com