Deliverance

My work explores quilting as a vessel for storytelling, honoring the tradition of women’s craft while examining the intersection of personal and generational history. By repurposing fabric imbued with past lives and memories, I construct pieces that embody both the resilience and fragility of the individuals in my family, capturing their struggles, aspirations, and constraints. Through abstraction, material manipulation, and narrative layering, my quilts function as both historical records and contemporary reflections, bridging the past and present through the tactile language of textile art. In describing a quilt as an object, I am including all material, patterning, orientation, scale, and process of coming into existence that results in a face, batting, backing, and top stitch as a ‘quilt’. The pieces in this body center on one or two members of my family and their stories with which I’m well acquainted. In retelling their stories in this way, I am both memorializing the path my family has trod and partnering with generations of women who have told stories through quilting, all while seeking contemporary integrations in my practice. My fabric is generally sourced from dresses, sheets, tablecloths, and jeans— whatever has enough surface material to be harvested, treated, and dyed to serve my purpose. In sourcing, however, I am not producing a piece without history, I am editing a surface preloaded with a life of its own. To do this is to alter an object that has covered a stranger’s body, dressed a stranger’s bed—a witness to places I can't go. I am unable to erase their previous ownership. Through dying sourced fabric, I am able to converse in ii my language, but the wholistic narrative will never be my singular experience. The same is true for the retelling of stories. These memories I have are fragments, most of them are aided by photographs and by my parent’s memories or my sibling’s. But to retell a story is to take an existing experience and to make it in my voice, to edit to alter to emphasize what I find important and to minimize other details. To bring my perspective to the surface and rely on supporting shreds to fill gaps where the original story has faded over the years. In creating this body of work, I aim to honor those who came before me, acknowledging that it is by standing on their shoulders that I find myself in my current position of privilege to study, create, and discuss art in pursuit of higher education.