MUSINGS ON MAKING AN INSTALLATION Quilting as sculptural vocabulary, process, medium. In process. The finished quilt squares, over a hundred pieces, will be used with a variety of materials to make a very large sculpture that hangs in space.
White clothing: cloaked with white implies innocence, purity, virginity, holiness, fragility, peace. Wedding dresses, baptismal gowns, shrouds.
Our clothes journey around with us, through time and space, worn by movement and heat and stress. They hold traces of silent histories.
These scraps were cut from clothing collected at local thrift shops, flea markets, my daughters drawers, my own closet. The scraps vary from wool to silk, natural fibers to manmade synthetics. Fabrics from fancy lace dresses to elasticized undergarments to woolen coats. Fabric that has been around. It's been explored, worn, torn, rebuilt, worked by and with many hands, and then it finds my hands.
The cloth tumbles, is manipulated through a journey of considerations.
Thread. It's simple, thin and fragile. A whisper of existence, it’s almost inconsequential, but complex in its necessity. Thread binds. It connects. It defines the space and tension between cloth. It joins into two into one. A whole of pieces, a community of incongruous parts. Thread becomes my pencil, creating edges and defining new shapes.
The draw of the thread is monotonous, motion becomes lost in thought. The hands comply to a moving meditation. Piecing becomes a visual act of consideration. There are questions to be answered, problems to be solved. Two dimensions become three. And soon enough, I have a whole stack of fabric pages. Textile fairytales.
Each square of fabric is the same, the same size, the same color palette, the same materials. Each square is a different solution, a different set of questions, a different visual playground, a wildly different image.