My Practice

I work with discarded and disintegrating quilts, found stuffed away in attics or tossed at the Goodwill.

These objects exist on the edge of meaning, no longer prominent or useful in the home. I work with them, deconstructing, reconstructing, and engaging with their structure and material logic. I pause time. In the pause, something crucial and mysterious happens: I collaborate with the lost makers who created these objects.

The hands and minds that made these heirlooms are gone, as are the hands and minds that valued and used these heirlooms in daily life. I’m here, in active conversation with this loss. I take liberties, crossing over into the proactive power of creation through a reworking of these objects. My own choices respond to the material that remains and the choices of past makers that I study and trace with my hands.

I work with textiles today because they have the tactile ability to convey human care. Working with them requires a physical act of focus and perseverance. I make this work for my own well-being and in the hopes of sharing with others the potential to experience the past we are attached to and the future we hope to create.

Video by Loam, LLC, 2022

This project was supported by the North Carolina Arts Council, a division of the Department of Natural and Cultural Resources.