Tag: quilting

558: “Objects in Constant Conversation” (Hattie Lee Mendoza)

                “Histories on many spectrums—ancestral, artistic, material, personal, and cultural—fuel my practice.
                My studio is a flux of mediums and objects in constant conversation with each other…”
                -Hattie Lee Mendoza (Cherokee), in her artist statement

                Today I got to attend a workshop with Hattie Lee Mendoza. (Here’s some of her art). I got to help carry in boxes of fabric scraps and beads, old bracelets and hole-punched playing cards and thread. Mendoza led us in laying them out, inviting, to cover three tables. She described sketching as a kind of layering things together, seeing how they fit, how the colors play and interplay. How they talk.
                My piece isn’t finished. Right now it’s wrapped up in my backpack, waiting for more stitches. Stitching makes me feel close to my mom, who taught me how to sew. To my aunt and my mom, who sat together laughing and hemming pants for my cousin’s wedding. To a family friend who calmly suggested I could keep sewing after I’d accidentally jabbed my finger. To my grandmother whose embroidery hangs in my mom’s kitchen. To an old roommate who loaned me embroidery thread to fix a hole in a pair of jeans, showing me how I could join the tear into a little scene mountains and rising sun. To another friend whose favorite coat we repaired together. Now the pocket doesn’t swallow their keys. To the friends I sat with at the workshop table today. 
                Mendoza suggested: start with the pieces you most want to include. The found objects and scraps, keys and buttons and shower tiles. See what goes with them. Following Mendoza’s teachings, sitting down became a kind of unfolding: like joining friends to take my unfinished cloth collage out of my backpack and listen as great grandma’s embroidery speaks to the playing cards and a twig from outside and the orange-silver pattern my friend is finding next to me. I’d like to finish this piece. And I’m glad the conversation goes on.

by Azlan

546: “Your Grandma Made That Quilt” (R. Kikuo Johnson)

                “Hold on, bud, your grandma made that quilt…” – R. Kikuo Johnson, No One Else, p. 96

                What work did I do today?
                Some emails, yes. There are always more of those. Some writing toward one research project, some reading toward another. A couple phone calls. More emails. Teaching a long seminar, and last preparations before it, and notes afterward on how I might lead it differently next time. Follow up emails from participants’ questions. And washing an apple, cutting it for my beloved on the cutting board they got me, arranging the slices in a wave around some peanut butter. A snack for partway through a busy afternoon.
                The systems around me keep insisting that work is what I do for payment. In the face of that noise, R. Kikuo Johnson’s No One Else paints with all the hidden, submerged work of families, communities, overlapping lives. At the heart of the book is all the years a woman spends caretaking her elderly father. After the first page, we never see that. Not directly. We feel it: a kind of haunting inside the pages, inside the house’s walls. We hear it mentioned once. We see so little of the grandmother’s and grandfather’s work in shaping the world their family lives in, so little of the kid’s work in trying to care for his mother as she cares for her father. It hurts, all this work that goes unread. And it lifts up lives like sap lifts the leaves of a tree the kid stares into, searching for his lost cat. 
                He finds the cat. It snuggles in his lap. No One Else turns me toward all the work that goes into an ongoing moment, and suggests that seeing might mean opening to what’s outside the frame.

by Azlan