I am a fiber artist working with recycled newspaper, textiles, and soft, often unconventional materials. My primary creative process centers on printing, painting, and cutting, complemented by machine stitching. I also create large-scale installations, three-dimensional objects from handmade paper pulp, and layered wall hangings. Experimentation and research are essential to my process, often leading to unexpected discoveries. Even unsuccessful trials become fertile ground for new directions and material innovations.

A central focus of my work is the experience of urban existence. Over decades, I have developed a visual language using city maps—distorted, layered, and distressed—to explore the complex nature of orientation and identity. Transparency plays a key role, allowing multiple layers of meaning to appear and fade. These textured compositions echo the way we navigate memory, place, and belonging, reflecting an ongoing, delicate negotiation between the physical, mental, and spiritual dimensions of being.

Eszter Bornemisza is a fiber artist based in Budapest, working with recycled paper, textiles, and discarded soft materials such as X-ray and integrated circuit films. Her primary techniques are printing, painting, and cutting, complemented by machine stitching. She creates large-scale installations, three-dimensional objects from handmade paper pulp and wall hangings. Originally trained as a mathematician, Bornemisza began making art quilts in the mid-1990s as a self-taught artist, experimenting with the fusion of paper and cloth. More recently, she has focused on translucent wall hangings and installations created from newspaper and thread.

A long-standing theme in her work is urban existence. For over two decades, she has explored city maps—distorting, layering, and altering them into complex, transparent surfaces where shadows play an active role.

Artist Talk with Eszter Bornemisza

Interview with Eszter Bornemisza

In  this time of uncertainty, isolation and frustration, I was drawn to creating idealized, comforting interiors—spaces that offered a retreat from the pressurized atmosphere of the real world. These rooms were born from a longing for a safer, more serene time that never truly existed, offering a form of visual solace in an era of crisis.

My work is a meditation on the past—on the perceived innocence and simplicity that we often yearn for when the present feels fractured and unstable. Through illusion, decoration, and recollection, nostalgia becomes both a refuge and a mirror, offering a fleeting escape from the present while conjuring a past that was far from perfect.

Born in Decatur, Alabama, Haney received her BA from Rhodes College in Memphis and her MFA in Painting from Claremont Graduate University in Claremont, CA. Haney has attended MacDowell as well as the Vermont Studio Center. In 2022, she was a resident at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts in Amherst, VA.. Haney was the recipient of the Mississippi Art Commission Individual Artist Fellowship in 2008. Her work has been exhibited in solo shows in California, Virginia, Massachusetts, Florida, Alabama, Tennessee, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Kentucky and in over 70 juried group exhibitions. Haney’s work was shown at the Spring/Break Art Fair in New York City in 2022, 2023 and 2025. She had solo exhibitions in 2024 at Second Street Gallery in Charlottesville, VA and Spectrum Fine Arts in Seattle, WA.

Haney currently teaches Studio Art and Art History at Piedmont Virginia Community College, Sweet Briar College, and Buford Middle School. The artist lives and works in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Guided Tour by Lou Haney

Interview with Lou Haney