Family, patriarchy, and diaspora compressed into a single trembling cap
There are artists who work mainly with material, and artists who work mainly with memory. With Camille Eskell, the two are fused. When she embroiders beads and thread onto the small curved surface of a fez, she is not decorating an object; she is quietly rewriting a whole emotional history.
The fez in her hands stops being a prop. It becomes a stand-in for the head and the body; a compact battlefield where family pride, patriarchy, migration, religion, and survival press against each other. Her pieces often sit on pedestals like ceremonial objects that have lost their original function; the line of inheritance is interrupted so that another story can finally be told.
A Fez as a Family Archive
Eskell is a first generation American from an Iraqi Jewish family that were born and raised in India before arriving in the United States. Both of her grandfathers worked in the fez trade, producing and selling those caps that once signaled status, tradition, and a certain ideal of masculinity. The fez literally supported the family; it paid the rent and anchored their sense of who they were.
In the series that has accompanied her for years, often referred to as The Fez as Storyteller, she takes this inherited object and turns it into a kind of three dimensional diary. Fez forms are wrapped in sari fabric, trimmed with lace and ribbons, loaded with photographs and tiny ornaments, fragments of Hebrew, lions, flowers, borders from Middle Eastern and South Asian textiles. Mothers, aunts, uncles, her father reappear across the surfaces; sometimes glamorous, sometimes blurred, sometimes repeated until they start to feel like a chant.
At first, the pieces may seem festive; bright, detailed, almost celebratory. Then the tension comes into focus. A beautiful female relative smiles confidently, while a line of text beneath her thanks God for not having been born a woman. Her aunts and cousins share the same cap, but are framed in ways that hint at rivalry and expectation. The fez becomes a compressed family archive that refuses any sweet, simplified version of the story.
Eskell grew up as the youngest of three daughters in a context where a son was deeply desired. That unspoken wish, that sense that the “right” child never arrived, weighs heavily on a sensitive child. In her work, that feeling is turned around; the girl who was not the expected boy now controls the images, the symbols, the narrative. Each stitch is a small but firm correction.
Dancers, Nostalgia, and the Mask of Femininity
In the conversation, Eskell returned several times to the figure of the dancer. In some pieces, women dancers appear with layered costumes and stylized poses, hovering between memory and stereotype. On one level they point to the popular imagination of Middle Eastern and South Asian cultures; the belly dancer as exotic icon, the entertainer at family celebrations.
Eskell looks at this figure with a double gaze. Historically, such performers occupied an unstable but significant position. They were visible, earning money and attention, yet their bodies existed at the edge of respectability. They personified fantasy and were judged for it at the same time.
In her work, the dancer becomes a way to talk about how women have carried the emotional and social burden of the community; expected to entertain, smooth tensions, maintain appearances, while their own desires are pushed to the side. Fabric and ornament in these pieces are never neutral. They suggest how femininity is constructed; taught, rehearsed, performed; and how, inside that performance, women still find tiny pockets of agency.
The same double movement animates the fez series. The caps are lovingly adorned, but the decoration never feels innocent. It carries the weight of roles learned early: be graceful, be accommodating, be pleasing; even when what you really feel is fear, anxiety, or anger.
Growing Up Under Patriarchy
Eskell does not turn her childhood into a polite anecdote, but she also refuses to flatten it into a simple accusation. She speaks of a home where emotions could shift quickly; affection, tension, humor, and silence often shared the same room. In many Mediterranean and Middle Eastern style families, the father is expected to be the anchor; strong, decisive, almost unquestionable. In her memories that figure is complicated; protective in some moments, harsh in others; deeply loved, yet leaving emotional marks that would only be fully understood years later.
Some of those impressions resurface in another important body of work, the Truncated series. Here she casts female torsos and limbs in resin, then layers them with drawn or printed imagery that recalls tattoos; vines, roses, fruit, teeth, snakes. The classical female torso is not serene; it is interrupted, opened, reworked. Roses bloom on a body that has been split; inside, a small storm of symbols presses against the skin.
These sculptures carry a charged mix of sensuality and unease. Beauty and disruption share the same surface. Teeth lodged in the torso hint not only at hurt, but at self protection; the sense that a body which has experienced too much begins to grow its own armor.
The women that inhabit these pieces, and the presences that haunt the fezzes, are not reduced to allegories. They are tender and fierce at once; marked by experience, but not resigned to it. They are tired of existing only in the background. The techniques that shape them; embroidery, beading, lace; the intimate languages of domestic work; become quiet instruments of resistance, where care itself turns into a way of answering back.
Becoming an Artist in a Rough Landscape
Eskell’s path as an artist began in the 1970s, in the middle of the first big wave of feminist art. It was a moment when women artists were intensely active; creating performance pieces, experimental films, installations; yet the institutional doors were still half closed. She studied, worked, and slowly built a visual language that could hold psychological complexity without losing its connection to lived experience.
Early on, she experimented with drawing on paper using clear gel and oil pastels, layering transparent and opaque marks until figures seemed to emerge from a kind of fog. That interest in layered states of mind never left her. Over the years, painting, drawing, collage, sculptural work with resin, and the fez objects slowly converged into a single universe, where inner states and family narratives are always entangled.
The feminist climate of the 1970s and 1980s gave her tools and courage; but it did not magically erase structural barriers. Like many women of her generation, she moved through a rough terrain of small shows, occasional recognition, long stretches of silence, and the constant need to support herself through teaching and other work. Perseverance was not a slogan; it was a daily practice.
The Art World Now: Youth, Noise, and Slow Work
In the present, Eskell looks at the art world with a mix of clarity and fatigue. She has recently had solo and group exhibitions that she prepared with great care, and yet the response did not always match the depth of the work. That is not simply a personal disappointment; it reflects a general trend.
Many galleries openly promote “young” as a selling point. Youth has become a label that reassures collectors; an investment in something new, a ticket to be ahead of the curve. At the same time, the system pushes younger artists toward constant visibility; networking, social media, an almost nonstop production of content.
As a long-time teacher, she sees this pressure on her students. They are told that talent is not enough; they must also cultivate contacts, build an image, and keep up with trends. She does not dismiss the importance of connections, but she knows how easily the quieter, slower kind of work; the kind that takes decades to ripen; can be pushed aside in this climate.
Her own practice, with its dense layers of history and emotion, does not lend itself to fast consumption. A fez loaded with family images and coded references is not something you “get” in two seconds at an art fair. It asks for time; and time is precisely what the contemporary art economy rarely offers.
Jewishness, Diaspora, and the Need for Nuance
Being a Jewish artist today, particularly one rooted in a less widely known history like the Iraqi Indian diaspora, carries its own complications. Eskell’s family story includes migration, adaptation, and the constant negotiation between different cultural expectations. The fez works hold all of this in a compressed form; Middle Eastern, South Asian, and Western references sit together on the same cap.
In conversation she reflects on how difficult it has become, in the current political climate, to speak about Jewishness without being immediately pulled into polarized debates. Her work chooses another approach. It stays close to lived experience; to family photographs, to fragments of prayer, to the way gender roles were shaped inside the home. The complexity of identity emerges from those details, without needing to be turned into a slogan.
At the same time, she is fully aware of the larger picture; the history of antisemitism, the unresolved tensions in the Middle East, the rise of nationalism and religious extremism in many parts of the world. That awareness is not shouted in the work, but it is present as a low, persistent vibration. The fez caps, with their mixture of pride and discomfort, nostalgia and critique, feel like small altars to nuance.
Mediterranean Codes and Gendered Power
Although Eskell’s story is deeply specific, it resonates strongly with broader Mediterranean cultures. The shared patterns are easy to recognize: the idealized strong father; the mother who sacrifices; the daughter who must protect the family’s reputation; the son who carries the official future of the lineage. These scripts cross religions and borders. They shape expectations in Christian, Jewish, and Muslim households alike.
Her sculptures expose the emotional cost of these codes. In some works, garments and adornments seem to hang from invisible bodies, as if the person has been erased under the performance required of them. In others, the fez sits slightly apart, like a crown looking for a head that can no longer bear its weight.
By combining materials from different geographies; sari fabrics, decorative trims, imported lace, printed photographs; she quietly echoes the way migrant families assemble their identities from whatever is at hand. The result is not a smooth multicultural harmony, but something more truthful; a layered, sometimes contradictory, always fragile balance.
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