My pandemic quilt, Anxiety Shield: Night Watch, has been accepted for the Visions Art Museum exhibit, Visions: Interpretations. The dates are October 16 2021, through January 2, 2022. I wonder how many other artists in the exhibit will have found their inspiration in the uncertain year we have just lived through? I have gotten both my vaccine doses and I feel a lightening of spirit. Being able to be outside more helps too. Today I met at a friend’s house and dug up some prairie dropseed, a native grass. I am trying to move toward native varieties of plants. Later, I tore out invading periwinkles in my front garden bed with gusto.
Anxiety Shield: Night Watch (2021) 48 x 34 “ Cotton. wool. buttons, hand embroidered and stitched.
A little about this piece— I was given a beautiful, Japanese-style indigo dyed jacket a few years ago. I stitched all over it with a constellation of white thread and then put it away. I didn’t think I wanted to show it as a garment, so I deconstructed it and just lived with the pieces for awhile. When I started to think about the anxiety shield series I pulled out those pieces and started working with other layers to begin to develop the surface and the image. The pinkish layer is maybe a receiving blanket with unfinished (and inexpert) embroidery clouds or some such, unearthed in the family basement and of unknown provenance. I solar-dyed that in quarters, mixing sepia with red for that unusual color. The maroon cotton layer is a disassembled junior choir robe—the short kind that goes over a white cassock—also reclaimed from the family basement (there must have been a lot of robes, because I have a lot of this cloth). The backing is pieced woven wool, a very nice substrate for stitching. The uneven edge at the bottom appealed to me, and I continued that element in all three of the pieces in the series. The stitches suggest the circular thoughts of sleepless nights, the low-level anxiety of incoming worries. Interestingly, I found the actual process of doing that much hand stitching to be very centering. Who knew?