Deborah Benioff Friedman

Deborah Benioff Friedman, is an artist and veterinarian living in the San Francisco East Bay. She works with a variety of materials, mostly repurposed, but has a special affinity for teabags (to make quilts, ships, ghost houses, bowls and books), and momigami (kneaded paper) creating pieces that reflect her attachment to the worn and discarded. 

She appreciates the contributions of time, weather, and friction to bring life and color to her art.  She often works with books (altered, distressed or curiously bound), and loves the way a hand-made, or an old and much thumbed book feels in the hands, or at least looks like something you want to hold. Such evidence of handling, this patina, is most important to her, the worn page, the torn cover, creases, footnotes, doodles, wrinkles, stains. The wandering thread, a running stitch, sometimes works as its own text, creates its own vocabulary and finds its way into many of the objects she makes.

She is self-taught but has worked extensively with Lisa Kokin as well as other artists in California. Her father, a sculptor and physician imparted to her early, not only the importance of art in the world of medicine, but the joy of materials (however curious or unconventional) in her hands. His emphasis on simplicity, balance and avoidance of artifice, have been the backbones of her work.