From its foundation in Feminism, my work reflects the quilt as an art form and a metaphor for my life and the lives of women of my generation.
I was asked, “What is a quilt?” It is a question that, at first, seems obvious, but the answer goes much deeper than a hand-made bedcovering. The process of defining a quilt is the essence of my art. The quilt is a sign of women’s work. The making of a quilt implies a chain of signification through conception, use, deterioration, and, in my case, transformation.
Multiple layers of the conceptual and the material make up my body of work.
A series of actions interrelate in a chain of signification. The actions that describe the creation of a quilt are also the concepts that influence my transformation. I use the term quilt to describe both the found artifact and my painted resurrection, because they are at once the same and different. At other times, I refer to the finished work as painting because it is that, as well.
The quilt as a sign for bed interests me, yet I nearly always remove quilts from the bed and put them on the wall. For his collage, Bed, Robert Rauschenberg took a quilt from a bed and destroyed it to make art in 1955. The difference is that I am interested in taking already damaged quilts and transforming them into art. I later realized that seeing that work in the Museum of Modern Art in 1968 has influenced me.
A quilt is a series of layers of fabric, layers of meaning, decisions of purpose and design. I am interested in the individual stories each quilt “knows”–as a witness to love and birth and dreams and death. I do not know these individual stories, only that they exist and have energy of their own. In transforming quilts, I interact with them in a way that is sometimes personal, sometimes metaphorical, and sometimes purely formal.
A quilt is shelter, adornment, and gift. A quilt is a story–a text that reveals a time in history, a vernacular. I am aware of its significance as both art history and women’s history.
My work developed as a chain of signification beginning with the recognition of quilt as a sign of pre-feminist “women’s work.” This work was created and executed with attention to design and purpose. It was used, washed, worn. Often, it was separated from its maker. It was found by me and painted–a sign not only of transformation, but also of post-feminist women’s achievement.