Months ago I took these handkerchiefs
Squares folded and tucked away by my grandmother and her mother and opened them to the waft of years.
For a moment I was sitting at my grandmother’s dressing table, inhaling deeply the perfume she kept in a small golden basket that looked like easter and smelled like musk. I was her and then her mother and the year was 1918 and death felt imminent.
I searched and felt for the pieces of fabric that might protect
Used to cover nose and mouth on account of a cough or sneeze.
I felt responsible to myself
But really to everyone
The world around
A world away
This place where
Our breath both gives and takes life.
And it is this sense of the imminence of death that pushes up the need to make good on life.
To tie it up in bundles for those who might come after.
And so I stitched. I took a pile of squares and hitched them together first as a photograph and then pulling time through threads, into a vocabulary of repair. Can you repair the present by tying it to the past, by looking back to see what was done (sometimes wrong sometimes right) and how, by adding the two together to find new ways, holding on to the squares of fabric that were once useful so that we might make them into something new? The Gees Bend quilters have done this masterfully and marvelously, taking what was old and functional, breaking it down to be reframed, rearranged into a recovery of story and time; speaking of those who did the work of living so we might too. Right now this is what feels essential, that it is our responsibility to do the work of living, to salvage from the detritus left in the wake of a certain destruction to do the work of righting ships lest they sail off a metaphorical cliff toward drowning. I feel the need to hold fiercely and gently in the same breathe, to travel in shoes not my own, to dive deep into stories beyond the known, to recover.
***
How do we salvage the texture of our being?
Feel for the frayed edges of fabric now unraveling
How do we selvedge our being?
Hem ourselves in to prevent a fragile periphery from disappearing
We are stitched from beginning to end
Cells sutured one to the next
And if a thread might be snagged tightened
Loosening our grip
The subtlety of our contours could well spill forth
Colliding
Saw toothed and full with crags
Our skin, blood, bone and marrow
Are the raw pieces sometimes exposed to the sun
Sometimes hidden away in dark places
Warm with a haunting safety
I think about what it means to loose one’s edge
Does it mean that we are no longer individual bunkers
But bombed out shells of ourselves
Or have we only shifted untethered roots
Opening seams
to the outside
We might now be hovering
On the verge
Halfway between
Hiding behind walls
Erected
And tearing it all down
Perhaps
Though
An in-between place exists
Where we are unearthed
Brought up to the light and
Amidst dust motes
The filaments of our mottled flesh
Unwoven
Begin to rub up against one another
Enmesh
Toward the strength of new fabric
Woven of wizened fibers
To Begin…
Notes on individual pieces:
#2-10, 12x18 inch prints of stacked handkerchiefs with thread
#11-13, 22x30 inch mixed media watercolor, pencil, pinpricks and thread
#14-16, 20x30 inch photographic print with thread