At the seams of our passage

At the Seams of Our Passage is a written thesis and body of visual work completed by Kelsey Voy at the University of Iowa Center for the Book. Cloth is utilitarian yet intimate, always closest to skin, a layer of protection, and an extension of our bodies. Our clothing, bedsheets, towels, quilts, and pillowcases absorb and retain a repository of physical and emotional memory. They are strained when we are, and they hold our love and loss. This project encompasses both scholarly and creative research grounded in an exploration of early-modern, European women’s medical knowledge and material experience. Their everyday procedures of care reveal an embodied knowledge in which textiles were both medical and spiritual material. The pocket emerged as a hallmark utilitarian textile that is rich in metaphor. Pockets are a place of privacy, a personal altar, a cache of tools that relay the daily tasks, and a threshold between the body and the material world, where sentimental objects are held in proximity so that their potential may be felt. In exploring these intersections, Kelsey responds with her needle, draws with thread, wrinkles paper, and prints with memory. Press Open is the resulting artist’s book that explores the unknowns of family history through pockets, handkerchiefs, letters, and a quilt left behind.