Anxiety Shields on Exhibit

All three of the Anxiety Shields will be on exhibit this fall. Night Watch is in Interpretations at the Visions Museum in San Diego from October 16 through January 2, 2022. Force Field and Vigil will be exhibited at the Schweinfurth Art Center, Auburn NY in Quilts=Art+Quilts from October 23 through January 9, 2022.

Anxiety Shield: Vigil, 48 x 34”, cotton, wool, buttons, hand embroidered and stitched

I have written about the Anxiety Shields in previous posts but I would like to add that I am so honored to have these very personal pieces selected and exhibited for Interpretations and Q=A=Q . I am scheduled for some zoom and YouTube artist talks associated with these pieces and will include more information next month.

Reading List:

I have read some really great books lately:

The Sweetness of Water, by Nathan Harris; The Aviary, by Diedre McNamer; Kindred, by Octavia Butler (an oldie but goodie); and Wayward, by Diana Spiotta. On the non-fiction side, I am giving a five star rating to two wonderful books: All That She Carried, by Tiya Miles ( a fascinating and moving investigation and account of a textile artifact from the antebellum south) and Neither Wolf Nor Dog, by Kent Nerbern (when I was at the Quilt National closing, I enjoyed meeting Jean Jurgenson, who told me this was a “must read”—and she was right). I did both of these on audio and the readers were amazing.

The fall garden is calling, the weather has been lovely, and I am experimenting with a new idea called “Apron Strings”—meditations on mothering. More on that later. You can see in-progress photos on my Instagram feed at @hgeglio.

Mender of Rifts

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.

Entwined

August 5, an exhibit of fiber art opens in the community building at South Bend’s Howard Park. This is the first show in a new Arts Series and I am honored to be included. The works I will be showing are two Anxiety Shield quilts and five of my Women’s PPE breastplates. Howard Park is a beautifully redesigned city park near where I live in downtown South Bend. An amazing playground, skate ribbon and beautiful walkway, lined with native plants along the St. Joseph Riverfront, are just a few of the features that draw people from all over the city to this wonderful space.

“During this past year, a lot of my friends were sewing masks, I was making armor.”

Next month I will be writing about the Wisdom Cloak that is in Quilt National 21. I will be part of a four-artist QN online talk on Friday, August 20 at 11:00AM, EDT. To see earlier Friday talks go to the Dairy Barn Video Page. To register for the last four Friday talks go here. You can see a “talking head” video I made, telling about my QN quilt here (it‘s short!) And lastly, a video about another Wisdom Cloak in the SAQA Primal Forces: Earth Global Exhibit is available now online here. That is a lot of video…and I am not a natural!

I am a natural reader! Here is what I have recently read:

The Dictionary of Lost Words, by Pip Williams; The Betrayals, by Bridget Collins; The Less Dead, by Denise Mina; Hour of the Witch, by Chris Bohjalian; Hot Stew, by Fiona Mozley; Songs in Ursa Major, by Emma Brodie, and The Trespasser, by Tana French.

Enjoy the last weeks of summer! My garden is glorious, the tomatoes have started and the bees, butterflies and hummingbirds are flying all over.

Community of Stitch

A beautiful sampler from fellow Arrowmont stitchers commemorating a fun, purposeful and creative week together. It was a joy to see such distinct and individual voices develop over an intense week of looking, thinking and experimenting. I left Tennessee with new artist friends, and this lovely strip of stitches. Here are a few details from larger pieces to savor! Top Row, L-R, Debbi, Caitlyn, Lee Ann. Bottom Row L-R, Elaine, Michiele, Justin.

I think in the end, we all need to find our own way as artists, but it is so nourishing to be with others; to share ideas, questions and methods as we journey on. Stitching is not a spectator sport, and we proved that many heads and hands truly are better than one head and two hands.

Alone Together

An exhibit by the Indiana Women’s Caucus for Art , Alone Together: Visual Stories from the Pandemic opens this week at the South Haven Center for the Arts, South Haven, MI. The SHCA is a beautifully repurposed Carnegie Library and the show is up until August 7, with a closing reception from 2-4. Two breastplates from my Women’s PPE series are on exhibit. The works can be viewed online here.

Artwork by Laurie Rousseau

Thinking in Stitches

This past few weeks I have been thinking in stitches. I have also been airing my collection of wool threads and fabrics, freshening storage places with herbal sachets to discourage moths, and getting my studio and materials back into order. I even moved furniture and vacuumed behind it.

I am sharing a few phone snaps of some sampling work I have done, visual meandering, playing with texture, color and materials.

I have also put up a new gallery with the Recollected and Gathered In works. This morning brought some desperately needed rain and I took the time to do some basic updates to my website and CV. Over a year ago, Jen Broemel asked if I would do an interview for her Art of Improv blog. I met Jen at Quilt National in 2019, a fellow Hoosier, and was delighted to be asked. The interview appeared on Jen’s blog during April of 2020, and like so much else during the first months of the pandemic, it slipped through the cracks for me. So, you can still read the interview by clicking the link above, and can also browse through the many other interesting interviews with so many talented artists that Jen has posted over the past couple of years.

What I am Reading:

Here are a few titles: Early Morning Riser, by Katherine Heiny; The Office of Historical Corrections, by Danielle Evans; Troubled Blood, by Robert Galbraith; The Children’s Blizzard, by Melanie Benjamin; Vera, by Carol Edgarian; and Parable of the Talents, by Octavia Butler.

The Children’s Blizzard opened up a whole new chapter of thinking for my westward expansion series, Territorial Road. I ordered more books for research.

Night Watch at VAM

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?

Threads of Connection

Over the past years I have encountered so many wonderful needlewomen who have shared their knowledge and wisdom with me. My latest Wisdom Cloak is a tribute to the generations of women who have passed on their creativity and skill, and have formed communities with stitches. Think about the eleventh century makers of the Bayeux Tapestry—telling the story of the Norman conquest in 230 feet of embroidery! Here are a few details-in-progress from this piece, on a wool blanket, with wool and cotton embroidery (and a little needle-felting) with linen backing. I still have some things to work out in this cloak, but I am enjoying the pleasure of hand-stitching and creating the surface as I go. This will be the last for the season. I would like to stitch two more in the fall. Wool is lovely to stitch, but not so much in the summertime.

What I am Reading

Here are a few titles from my recent reading list: In the Woods and Likeness, by Tana French; Dangerous Women, by Hope Adams; We Begin at the End, by Chris Whitaker and Miss Benson’s Beetle, by Rachel Joyce.

Wisdom Cloak: The Needlewomen (details-in-progress)

Archivist of Small Wonders

I thought I would share one of my earlier Wisdom Cloaks called Archivist of Small Wonders.

Wisdom Cloak: Archivist of Small Wonders (2020), 54 x 58”, wool, cotton, found objects, hand stitched. (Photo by Kay Westhues)

Spring always calls small wonders to mind as I search the ground for blooming snowdrops, nesting birds and crocus in the lawn. March brings joy in the everyday discoveries of a world awakening again. This piece began with a length of lightweight wool that a friend had given me and I later dyed with a walnut vat I was experimenting with. The color ended up more beige than a rich walnut, but I thought it would make a good backdrop for a collection of stitches and found objects. I used a fabric paint to spray one edge with a reddish brown and backed the piece with an indigo-dyed wool blanket that is peeking out around the edges. This wool sandwich was a delight to hand-stitch. The wisdom of finding wonder in small things, and collecting and celebrating those moments is not lost on me. In our time of pandemic and other upheavals I want to hold fast to that wisdom.

Books I have read:

Kafka on the Shore, by Haruki Murakami; Afterlife, by Julia Alvarez; At the Edge of the Haight, by Katherine Seligman; In the Woods, by Tana French.

Breathing Room

It feels pretty good to know I don’t need to be checking my news outlets throughout the day, and I can enjoy the peace of knowing that there is a plan, and the people in charge have experience and a commitment to a healthy and just future for everyone.

Anxiety Shield: Force Field (48 x 34”), Cotton, buttons, hand embroidered and stitched.

I made three of these Anxiety Shield quilts during the period between late October 2020 and mid-January 2021. A weight has lifted and I am moving on to more Wisdom Cloaks in the cold months ahead (I added a new website gallery of some of these today). I also added a gallery of the Women’s PPE series that I made this summer.

I will be teaching a week-long workshop at Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts June 6-11, 2021. Registration opens February 1. Click the link to learn more.

Here are a few titles from my recent reading list:

Shadow of the Wind, by Carlos Ruiz Zafon; Good Morning Midnight, by Lily Brooks Dalton; Mexican Gothic, by Silvia Moreno-Garcia; and Feast Your Eyes, by Myla Goldberg.

Be well. Be hopeful.

Winter Begins

Wisdom Cloak: Grounded, wool embroidery on wool felt (detail)

We have a cold sunny day here for the winter solstice. It will begin getting dark at about 4:30 in the afternoon. A good day for soup. I had thought that Grounded was finished last spring, but I had a hard time getting the light and color just right when I took photos, and the more I looked, the more I felt I needed to rethink the design. Rethinking has been my theme for 2020, so I am ending the year with a newly envisioned cloak, covered with wool stitches, inspired by the lavishly abundant embroidery of Eastern Europe. I was remembering the dark stories set in a winter wood, with wolves, witches, and wise women inhabiting a strange and mysteriously powerful forest place.

A couple of good books I have read recently: Uprooted, by Naomi Novik (this is where my interest in the magical woods started); Disappearing Earth, by Julia Phillips; Circe, by Madeline Miller; The Great Believers, by Rebecca Makaii (I loved this book, set in Chicago); and The World in Half, by Cristina Henriquez.

After a difficult year, I am ending 2020 with a hopeful heart. Our family will be zooming in for Christmas, looking forward to being together again in 2021.

BEST WISHES FOR A HAPPY HOLIDAY SEASON AND A JOYFUL NEW YEAR!