This coming Labor Day weekend marks the end of Quilt National 21 at the Dairy Barn in Athens, Ohio. I plan to make the trip for the closing and I am looking forward to meeting artists I don’t know, and others I do. You can see a virtual tour of the exhibit by clicking the link. You can also hear me talk a little about my entry, Wisdom Cloak: Mender of Rifts, at an artist panel discussion, moderated by Holly Ittel. You can see many other videos of artist talks and artist panels at the Dairy Barn You Tube channel. Holly has pulled together so many new ways to connect the quilts to new audiences. Thanks Holly!
Wisdom Cloak: Mender of Rifts, (2020) 52 x 60”, photo by Kay Westhues
Mender of Rifts was given the SAQA award, and I am so very honored about that. I made the Wisdom Cloak series as a celebration of the collective wisdom of older women— garments of power and resilience. One of the ideas that shaped this series into being was an article that a friend sent me from Artnet News. The headline: Experts in Pompeii Have Discovered a Female Sorcerer’s Mysterious Arsenal of Charms, led to the inclusion and embedding of many small objects into the surface of each quilted cloak. The symbolic use of amulets and charms, designed and wielded for protection or to gain a deepest desire, resonated for me. These cloaks appear ancient, made of warmest wool, mended and heavily sewn by hand with a vocabulary of stitches. In November of 2022, a collection of the cloaks, titled Cloaked in Wisdom, will be exhibited at Visions Museum in San Diego, CA. Mender of Rifts will travel along with The QN21 collection to other venues. And I’m not done yet…I just dyed some felted wool in the most beautiful deep rusty orange for another cloak.