Introduction

When my mom was in high school she had a sweater with a tag that said “Cassidy.” She had a secret dream around that time that she would give her daughter that name. A decade and a half later, she and my father did. For my middle name, they chose the name of my mom’s great-grandmother, Granny Mae, a woman who made over 100 quilts in her lifetime. What a coincidence, then, that I would go on to be so interested in textiles. Or, more likely, not a coincidence at all. 

I grew up in Northern Illinois, halfway between Chicago and the Wisconsin border, and 30 minutes away from where both of my parents grew up. My grandparents live in the same homes my mom and dad spent their childhoods in, and my large extended family are close by—omnipresent in my life. When I was born, I was given a quilt made by my mother, my aunts, my grandmothers, my great grandmother, and my elder cousins. Each of them contributed a quilt block of gender-neutral calicos, and their names are embroidered on the back. Quilting was not something my family really did, despite Granny Mae’s prolific exploration of the medium. My baby quilt was only the second quilt my mom had ever made. She completed the first while living alone in Texas for over a year, the longest she’d ever been from her family. She took a quilting class as a way to fill her time, do something social, and learn about Texas. My maternal grandmother doesn’t make quilts, but my mom’s childhood home is covered in them, most of which were added after she moved out.

My grandmother might not make quilts but she does sew, embroider, and knit. When my mom was a kid, my grandmother made a lot of her and her siblings’ clothes. I grew up with her embroideries framed on the wall and with a knitting project always in her bag to occupy her restless hands. When I was six years old, my grandmother taught me how to sew. It was over the summer, during the few precious weeks we spend every year at the cabin my great-great-grandfather built in the north woods of Wisconsin. We sat hand stitching a drawstring backpack out of an old calico pillowcase found in the back of the linen closet and yarn from the knitting basket next to the fireplace. My stitches were wobbly and loose, unsure and learning; hers were knowing and patient, even and tight.  

This story is mine, but it is echoed in the stories of so many other women across time and cultures. When asked, nearly every person who has learned how to sew, embroider, weave, knit, or crochet was taught by some sort of maternal figure. Maternal figures may not necessarily be blood relatives or even exclusively women, but they are always figures who elicit the emotional response a child typically has towards their mother. Nearly every person has memories of their grandmother, aunt, mother, or an elder chosen-family member sitting and working in their preferred textile medium, whatever that may have been. This matrilineality and association with the feminine has historically led to a devaluation of textiles as a medium. 

Even as women artists have reclaimed textiles in the 20th and 21st centuries, there has hardly been a material impact on everyday textile makers. Garment workers worldwide, primarily poor women of color, have been almost entirely erased from the public’s imagination through the myth of automation. Textile labor is now, perhaps more undervalued than ever, as these workers are paid meager wages, if any. And that is just the most extreme example of the ways textile labor, in its association with the feminine, is devalued. When I was in high school and told one of my teachers that I was going to college to study fashion and textiles, their response was, “but you’re so smart.” Based on my conversations with my peers this is not an individual experience. Textiles, and making them, are foundational to nearly every culture around the world. Yet, even as textile objects are collected in museums and present in every person’s daily life, they are devalued, seen as not serious or productive.  

This project emerged as a way to highlight the labor that goes into creating textiles by expanding the frame of the artwork to encompass the entire process of making, not just the end result. In doing so, I was forced to consider the position of the maker. The narrative of the subjugated woman bowing to her work had never resonated with my experience of textiles nor any of the people that I talked to and worked with on this project. Making quilts, embroidering, knitting, weaving, or any of the other countless ways to manipulate and create textiles has always been creatively, personally, and communally empowering work. The labor of making is layered, resulting in many products, not just the resulting textile. It is when I am working on textiles that I feel most a part of something larger, aware of not only my family but a much more extensive network of creators that span time and space. It is also when I feel most like me, a space where I have figured out so much about myself. Textile work allows space for introspection, self-discovery, and in many ways, the actual construction of my identity. I don’t mean to say that being productive is what makes me, or you, human. However, through this productive labor, I have been able to connect with some deep and true humanity. The time spent at work on textiles is time spent deeply in touch with one’s body and oneself in every possible sense. The object and its creation are a phenomenological process of knowledge creation as one embodies an approach that is at once profoundly personal, familial, cultural, and effeminate.

Stitched Together is a project meant to honor and affirm the feminine labor of textile production while engaging with nostalgia, family, identity, and the ways we make meaning. This project exists in multiple parts: this essay, a recreation of my baby quilt, a performance, and an invitation for participatory response performances. In this essay I endeavor to lay out my research and thinking pertaining to textiles while also sharing insight into the making of the Stitched Together performance and quilt. The recreation quilt was created over the course of two months with the help of seven of my family members (chosen and biological), several of whom had helped to create the original baby quilt. The performance was staged in my maternal grandparent’s home and depicts a figure, played by me, finishing the recreation quilt. The resulting two hour film documenting that performance was shot on the camcorder that captured much of my childhood. It is interspersed with archival footage and layers the hands of my participants at work on the quilt over the body as a way to interrogate labor as a way of making oneself. The aforementioned components seek to lay out, through theoretical exploration, creative production, and personal testimony, how the once subjugated figure at work on a textile can emerge an empowered subject through a process of introspection and self-reflection embedded in the process of textile creation, in my case, quilting. The final component is an invitation to create a communal textile in response; a textile that reflects and engages with the audience’s identity, family, and memory. 

Stitched Together brings textiles and performance together to interrogate situated knowledge, radical empathy, and textiles as a legitimate social, affective, and political form of meaning-making. Textiles, and their production methods, are multigenerational, passed down through a maternal lineage that spans back millennia. Due to this matrilineality, textiles become a site for the performance of femininity. The textiles themselves become a document of this performance, encoded with their makers’ thoughts, stories, and histories. 

While femininity was produced and enforced based on biological sex, it is essential to note that it is a societal product that does not only exhibit itself in female-identifying individuals. Femininity exists as a historically and socially fluid concept that can be either embraced or resisted by people of any gender identity. I use the term “women” fluidly to reflect the diversity of those who claim femme identities. It is also important to note that the femininity that I refer to here is a product of Western European society perpetuated on a global scale due to the enduring state of coloniality following the Victorian Era of European expansion.

Like many people, during the pandemic, and especially during quarantine, delving into textiles became a means of coping with fear and anxiety surrounding the virus, heartbreak, and anger in the wake of highly publicized violence against Black people and continued denial of justice, and the lack of leadership and morality in the Trump White House. Sewing, weaving, and embroidering became huge sources of empowerment, offering space for reflection, introspection, and refuge from the uncertainty and chaos. 

Ever since I was young, I have valued the time spent making textiles. Historically, and in my own life, it is a time spent in silence and thought, or a time spent in conversation with other women at work. In Earthly Paradise (1975), a collection of writings published after her death, 20th-century author Colette Drawn writes of her daughter, “…she is silent when she sews, silent for hours on end…she is silent, and she—why not write it down the word that frightens me—she is thinking”(205). In the past, the pose of a figure at work on textiles has been understood as the pose of a subjugated body—bowed head, silently confined to the home and pushed to the margins. However, like Rozsika Parker before me, I posit that the woman at work has access to psychological independence and, therefore, power (Parker xix). Through the performance of politics and social media networked affect, the creation of textiles, while representing the patriarchal constraints of femininity, also acts as a source of empowerment and situated knowledge creation for textile makers. The practice of making textiles gives insight into the lived realities and intellectual and emotional lives of textile makers situated across time and culture. Textiles also have the capacity to encode within their stitches the affect of their making. There is a clear aesthetic difference between the angry stitching of feminist textile artist Tracey Emin and the generational maternal love embodied in the varied yet careful stitches of my baby quilt. In this project, recreating the quilt made for me by my elder family members becomes a practice of radical empathy. Through Black feminist theories of radical empathy by Chandra T. Mohanty and Patricia Hill Collins, and by engaging in historical and cultural textile practices, a greater understanding of their makers is built.

Stitched Together allows insight and space to interrogate the layered and historical ways that social, affective, and counter ideological meaning is produced in textile work. These meanings can be understood through a renewed perception of the performance of gender and textile production, textiles as a site of empowerment, textiles as a politics of situated knowledge, and radical empathy accessed through the production of textiles. 

Textiles and Empowerment

The making of textiles is a creatively and intellectually empowering practice. Psychoanalytic thinking offers two theories that explain how the making of textiles might foster thought and psychological independence. The first of these theories being “containment,” first applied to art by Margot Waddell. In an unpublished essay, “The Containing Function of Art,” cited in Rozika Parker’s The Subversive Stitch (2019), she wrote, “the art object promotes and expands mental capacities by offering a shape and containing structure for the transformation of emotional experience into recognizable form”(xix-xx). The textile object, through the process of creativity, is a physical manifestation of thoughts and emotions. In this way, the textile exists, as Klein posits, as both an internal and external object, which can have a hugely positive effect on the sense of self (Bacal 59-60). The second psychoanalytical theory that explains the effect of the textile object on the maker is “mirroring” (Parker xix-xx). The textile object is made through a series of choices, imbuing the maker with agency. In the final product, then, that maker can see herself reflected back positively. The textile object becomes a mirror through which the textile maker can visualize themselves, and if the project is successful, this has a positive impact on self-esteem. These psychological phenomenons have been applied to embroidery before me by Rozika Parker, but I argue that these phenomena are applicable to all textile crafts.

I am particularly interested in the making of the self through the making of work—how what we do, constitutes who we are and how our inner life is mirrored back in our work. Making textiles is not just a practice to distract idle hands; it is an active construction of self. This notion is further complicated when textiles are understood as the communal objects they so often are. When textiles are created in communion with other women, the object is no longer only an object of self-containment and individual autonomy; they become documents of the relationships between women. The grandmother’s perfect stitches next to the child’s wobbly ones reflect that relationship, as do the matching embroidery samplers made by sisters sitting and chatting as they worked. I argue that these relationships, when reflected back to their makers through completed textiles products, imbue the individual with a sense of communal power. Through both Kleinian and Independent psychoanalytic understandings of objects, the effect of textile making can be understood beyond something that subjugates the women to the home but rather an activity that empowers her and renders her a threat to heteronormative conceptions of feminity.

Situated Knowledge Production Through the Performance of Textile Making

In its truest essence, textile production is a series of repetitive motions, performed by the body in tandem with tools and pieces of machinery, in the service of producing a final product. In this way, the body becomes easily understood as part of a machine or a cybernetic system. Like Susanna Paasonen, who built upon the work of Adrienne Rich, I apply an anti-cartesian understanding of the body and knowledge, privileging thinking through the body and identifying it as a site of power and knowledge developed through movement and embodied practices (Paasonen 1). The movements involved in textile creation become a way of thinking through the body, in the lineage of feminist theory on situated knowledge and lived experience—an embodied way of knowing. Ulrich Lehmann writes, “The manner in which fabric and the garment are produced reflects a way of thinking. The making begets the knowing,” (Harrod 61). Not only does the movement of the body represent a way of knowing, it represents a way of constructing the self. In Simians, Cyborgs, and Women (1991), Donna J. Haraway ties this notion of situated knowledge to Marxist labor theories. She writes, “All we touch and therefore know, including our organic and our social bodies, is made possible for us through labour,”(10). By superimposing the hands onto the body in my performance, I recall this Marxist concept wherein the “praxis of life— the production of the world— simultaneously produces the producer,”(Chambers 96).

This cybernetic reading of the textile maker’s body situated in the digital age begs questions related to cybernetic feminism. Sadie Plant has written extensively about the first site of software production being the loom and Jacquard’s cards (50-51). Computers developed out of weaving, and the digital space is woven into the matrilineal production of textiles. Cyberfeminism’s theorizing of technology makes space for women to engage with one another, amplifying power through community fostered in cyberspace while remaining rooted in physical practices of the body. In her “Eleven (Contradictory) Propositions on Contemporary Craft” (2013), Julia Bryan-Wilson names the complicated way craft navigates and functions in the digital world. Craft, and for my purposes, textiles specifically, maintain “tactile, bodily components in the face of computer technology,” while they have “embraced the digital...gone online” seen through, “the explosion of craft blogs, social media sites, and intimate interfaces with the internet,”(Harrod 67). This digital online community makes space for the practice of cyberfeminist politics through craft-based projects of networking and critical intervention, like the Tiny Pricks Project, where “contributors from around the world are stitching Donald Trump’s words into textiles, creating the material record of his presidency and of the movement against it,”(Weymar). 

Considering the state of social interaction and networking during a global pandemic, the internet takes on even more importance in organizing and sharing information. It becomes the place where almost all interaction is happening. Where this performance might’ve previously been performed in a more traditional space for performance art, there is no choice but to perform and distribute this project online at this time. Luckily, there is already a framework for the distribution of textile work online, especially through Instagram. This component of the performance gives space to interrogate theories of cyberfeminism as they pertain to contemporary textile art production. 

Radical Empathy Embodied in Textile Objects’ Encoded Meanings

Textiles’ capacity to contain and embody emotional states of being as well as situated knowledge allow them to be tools for radical empathy. Sadie Plant poetically identifies that “a piece of work so absorbing as a cloth is saturated with the thoughts of the people who produce it…”(Harrod 121). Textiles hold pieces of their maker within them as they serve as communal objects. In coming in contact with textile objects—using them, recreating them, mending them—we are able to access empathy. Textiles serve as a way to access and understand other women. Imagination, emotion, and intuition have been historically understood as women’s ways of thinking (Qi 334). Each of these skills is exhibited in textiles, and their presence serves as a means of accessing empathy through the textile object. 

Feminist and decolonial scholars have used the dichotomies of the personal/political and local/global to interrogate the individual’s positionality in the creation of women’s consciousness (Haraway 124). Textiles offer a means to straddle those in-between spaces, rendering the personal political and the local global and vice versa. As Donna J. Haraway identifies, each of us occupies a “very specific, non-innocent position in the local/global and personal/political terrain of contemporary mappings of women’s consciousness,”(124). I have no business marking my experience as universal; however, it is my hope that through the participatory score, the “webbed connections”(Haraway 191) between our experiences with textiles will rise to the surface. Beyond that, in engaging with the textile practices of others, we might be able to gain insight into their lived realities in a way that makes space for the diversity and richness of women’s experiences.

Conclusion

By dislocating the textile creation process, as well as the object, to the level of art through performance, this project validates and affirms the labor and embodied knowledge of women. In their stitches, textiles bring together the communal, the personal, and the political, giving insight into the women who make them. This is a performance of femininity, but recontextualized, it is not a patriarchal, heterosexual, binary construction of meekness and subjugation. Building off of nuanced notions of gender and gender roles, this project seeks to reflect and affirm a modern femininity that is expansive and inclusive. It posits that textiles are a site of shared matrilineal history that has the potential to unite women in the diversity of their experiences. Through the act of making textiles, the woman becomes a threat to patriarchal notions of femininity, emboldened through self-reflection and communal matrilineal practices. 

Due to their universal global presence, textiles have the potential to tell stories that have been marginalized while empowering the maker through the process of textile production. Textiles act as an accessible site of knowledge creation—the materials are not hard to come by, and the knowledge is easily accessible either in person or online. In a world where the everyday experiences of misogyny and sexism are “often an invisible problem,”(Bates 15) the traditionally feminine medium of textiles provides an opportunity for visibility, while the performance of making offers refuge, rest, reflection, and the tools for psychological empowerment. Visibility through textiles has potentially radical political ramification, seen through the mythic Underground Railroad quilts used to guide escaped slaves to freedom, the AIDS Memorial Quilt began in 1987 to honor and celebrate those who lost their lives, Madame Defarge’s knitting which encoded the names of people to be killed in Tale of Two Cities (1859), Hmong story cloths made to tell the stories of an attempted genocide of the Hmong people after the Vietnam War, and Afghan war rugs which began during the 1979 Soviet occupation and have continued through military, political, and social conflict. Textiles and making textiles become a site of a, “budding sense of collective historical subjectivity and agency and our ‘embodied’ accounts of truth,” (Haraway 186).

Methodology and Reflection

Beginning in early November, I spent two months at my childhood home working on this project. Stitched Together has always been deeply rooted in my home, so it felt especially right that I would do the bulk of the work there. When I began sourcing materials it was clear that this project was midwestern. When I was still in New York and tried to find the sorts of quilting fabrics I wanted, it was impossible. There is only one quilting store in the city, and they specialize in “modern and contemporary” materials. Aesthetically, they weren’t right at all. When I got back to Illinois, it was incredibly easy to find what I was looking for. The first store I walked into had exactly what needed, even carrying fabrics that directly resembled textiles I remembered growing up around. I had not anticipated that the materials themselves would be so rooted in the Midwest that I would have trouble finding them elsewhere.

My first task, once I had gathered my materials, was to reverse engineer the quilt. The original was made out of a pattern my mom found in a quilt book lost somewhere in our basement (found now, about three months too late). Despite being less than ideal in terms of efficacy, this proved to be an incredibly fruitful experience. It required that I really look at this object, which, having grown up with it, was easy to take for granted, not seeing it beyond its larger formal elements, familiar presence, and familial meaning. Even more recently, as this quilt has become an object of interest for me, one that I have written about, thought about, and made work about, it seems I never actually looked at it. As I began to figure out how exactly my mom made it, I was able to actually start to see it. See how the corners weren’t always square and didn’t always match up perfectly. How the shapes were slightly irregular, and the stitches were distinctly different. I could imagine who might’ve made what, and the whole quilt became animated by my imagination of its making. 

After mapping out the quilt and planning how many pieces and what shapes I needed to cut, I created stencils by tracing the existing quilt. Rather than recreating the exact same quilt, this renders the result of my project a translation, the original pattern filtered through the hands of family members twenty-one years ago, interpreted by me, and then recreated by my participants today. This translation process started with the cutting, which was ultimately straightforward despite taking longer than I had expected. I always like cutting the pieces for a project; it’s your first real hands-on introduction to your materials, you get introduced to each of their particularities: which is a bit stiffer than the others, which frays the most, which has a looser weaver, which has a little bit of stretch, which might prove to be unwieldy. 

Because the quilt is an appliqué quilt, I had to press all of the appliquéd shapes with their seam allowance tucked under. This process was truly painful (I kept burning my fingers with the iron), slow-moving, and incredibly frustrating (the edges—especially the curved ones—were refusing to stay pressed). After a long day bent over a table cutting pieces, I didn’t have the patience for it. What proceeded was perhaps the project’s only true meltdown. I stomped upstairs from my basement workstation in a slightly manic and completely visceral whirl of energy and expletives and told my family that I was done for the day. My mom, ever the fixer, pretty much immediately identified what I had been doing wrong and explained to me that I should make cardboard versions of the shapes to press them against and that I should be starching the fabric as I pressed them. Before I had any time to protest, she was in the basement pressing the ones I had quit on, and my step-dad, Mike, was back from Walgreens with a spray bottle of starch. Once I had calmed down a bit, she showed me how to do it, the same way she had done it over twenty-one years ago, and I was able to finish them all. 

I don’t know why I hadn’t done this before, but that was the first time I talked to my mom about her memory of making the quilt. She spoke to me about how tedious parts of the process were, about how hard it was to organize all of the participants who helped make the original quilt. Despite textiles being one of my main interests growing up and my mom having this history with them, it has never really been something we shared before. She doesn’t sew particularly often, she doesn’t remember who taught her to sew, and in her words, “it is not a particular strength of mine.” My grandmother taught me to sew, and after that, most of my sewing, etc., took place outside of our house, in classes at the local fabric store or school. In a way, this lineage I have put so much stress on seemed to skip a generation, but this project opened that communication, and I began to learn a lot from my mom. 

Like my mother’s, my quilt was going to be made by a network of women in my life. I expanded the network to include some of my chosen family members, friends from my childhood who are among the most important people in my life today. In light of the pandemic, this collaboration was challenging. In an ideal world, I might have been able to throw a mini-quilting bee with all of my family members, and we could all sit together. I was also limited by the inability to travel or mail things quickly to my out-of-state relatives. Instead, I created quilt packages, complete with two rectangles and hearts to be appliquéd, some needles and thread, handwritten notes with instructions on how to appliqué, and a description of the project. I asked for the finished quilt squares and a short video of each of them sewing in response. This project has always felt very intimate to me, maybe because it is so important to me and feels so deeply tied to my identity. To not be able to be with these people I love as they helped me complete it created a dissonance. Instead, we communicated through letters and text messages and sometimes a video as I helped explain to those less experienced how to complete their portion. 

All the while, I was appliquéing as well. There were thirty-six squares, and I assigned myself twenty-eight of them. During this time, I was sewing nearly all the time. I taught my sister how to sew as she completed her two hearts. Savanna is eighteen, three years younger than me, and despite having a fairly close childhood, we have never really had shared interests. Maybe it is just the contrarian in her, but she never wanted to do a lot of the things I did when we were young, so when it came time for her to do this, she had never really sewn before. Sharing something that I love so deeply and has meant so much to me with her was moving. Even more moving was seeing how hard she was trying to make it perfect. She sat for three days working on her squares. Her perfectionism, a virtue, and sometimes a challenge, made me so proud as she endeavored into this new frontier. 

For about a week, that was how we sat around the kitchen table, me, my sister, and my mom (who stepped up and did more than her assigned share, helping me with my lot). I can’t remember the last time we had ever done something like that—all sitting in the same space, doing the same thing, and just being together. 

The whole process was a learning experience. Approaching a quilt from my fashion background, seeing how it worked, and then adjusting. The first few shapes I cut out and pressed were angular and messy, nowhere near my standard for myself nor what the original quilt looked like. When I started using my mom’s system, I still struggled. It didn’t seem to work for me as it had worked for her. By the end, I had developed my own system, somewhere halfway between, her advice translated through my own experience and my own hand; this worked much better and resulted in the most successful shapes. It was so satisfying to see my improvement. In my work, as I continued to sew, I got faster and faster, and neater and neater; what had started out taking me an hour, I completed in less than half an hour once I found my rhythm through continued practice. When my participants returned their work to me I was able to identify their individual hands in their work. Ultimately, though, as I shuffled the squares into place on the quilt top, the individual was lost in the assemblage, in the creation of a cohesive whole. 

On Christmas day, I pieced the quilt top, sewing the individual blocks created by my participants into the top layer of the quilt. Seeing it all come together was magical and made me feel rather emotional. It was this day that I cut out the quilt back and the batting and pinned them all together, making the quilt ready to be quilted. The back of the quilt was made out of leftover yardage from the back of the original quilt that I found in our basement. Being able to use that original material was very special and linked the recreation quilt even more closely to the original. To complete the quilting process, I went with my immediate family up to the cabin in the woods, where I first learned how to sew. Situated in the north woods of Wisconsin, this house was built by my great-great-grandfather and is shared with all of his descendants. I don’t know much about my ancestors, but I do know that Pine Lake, that’s what it’s called, has been a special place for them as it is for me now. 

Over the course of three days, as it snowed incessantly, I sat in the loft above the wood-burning stove and quilted. In this space, in the middle of nowhere and out of the rhythm of my daily life, it was easy to feel outside of space and time. It was just me, my family, the Bon Iver albums I listened to on repeat, and my quilt. I made an effort to avoid using my phone and instead spent my time reflecting. When it comes to quilting, the goal is to have the smallest stitches possible and make them as close to invisible as you can. On the original quilt, my mom was extremely successful at this, and it was something that I struggled with A Lot—my inability to make perfect tiny stitches occupied most of my thoughts. I soon allowed myself to get lost in the stitches and stop trying to constrict myself to how I thought it should look. I had spent all of this time conceptually and critically celebrating and considering the individual’s hand being visible in the work. Yet, I was feeling constrained by trying to render mine invisible. As soon as I let go of that, I had a much more enjoyable time completing the quilt. Ultimately, I’m not sure there is anything I didn’t think about over those three days, and I emerged incredibly proud of myself, both about the work and in general. I packed it up and returned home, where I put the first half of the binding on, embroidered the back labels, and appliquéd them on the day before the performance. 

Meanwhile, I had been preparing for the performance itself—this project initiated from a vision of this performance in the fall of 2019. Everything I have done, all of the preparatory work, and the conceptual framing has been built around and building towards this solid vision in my mind. Of course, the image has changed pretty substantially, as there was no way I could have anticipated covid, but it has stayed largely the same. In service of this vision, I created a costume based on Victorian clothing, a nod to the era in which many of the specific gender politics I have been thinking about in relation to textiles were established. I sewed the costume by hand out of materials also in the quilt and lace my sister helped me pick out. I was also working to ensure the logistical and technological aspects of the performance, and the shoot would be possible. This included arranging a shooting date in my grandparent’s home when they would be away, so I could film with my skeleton crew of one other person (my stepdad) without exposing them. The technical things were all coordinated alongside my Mike, the one-person crew. We talked through the script multiple times and found the two cameras I wanted to use, one from the 90s, the same one my father, Steve, used to film most of childhood, and the other from the second half of my childhood after tape had rendered itself obsolete. We tested the projector set up and made sure we had all of the tools to realize the image I had been chasing. 

When the day came to film, I arrived at my grandparents’ house extremely anxious and extremely ready to be done. It had been two straight months of consistent and almost daily work on this project, and I was beginning to feel quite burnt out and ready for a break. It was the first time I had been in my grandparent’s house in over a year, a place that is only 30 minutes away from my home, a place where I spent a considerable amount of my childhood. It was incredibly eerie to be there alone when I would have liked to share this moment and this project with my grandparents. It also wasn’t until I was back in their house that I realized just how much their home is covered in quilts. Nearly every room has at least one quilt, if not many, layered all on top of each other. This project has always been an ode to my family in many ways, but quilting (at least quilt making) has always been a bit of a solitary interest. It wasn’t until I was in this space again that I realized just how influenced I had been by the aesthetics of my childhood and my grandmother’s apparent interest in quilt collecting. 

The performance itself felt so much like a continuation of everything that I had been doing that although I had been building to it for so long, it ended up feeling like just another day with my quilt. Of course, there was the orchestration of all of the technology and Mike’s role, but in the end, he was pretty self-sufficient, allowing me to be engaged primarily with the textile. To be honest, many of my thoughts that day as I was finishing were about how hungry I was and how much I wished I had eaten more before. I was also pretty preoccupied with the fact that my period had started that day. I was in a pretty considerable amount of pain. Despite so much of my theoretical framing being built around gender, I found in practice that the process of making this quilt didn’t feel very tied to my gender; it always felt more closely related to other parts of my identity. Throughout the course of this project, and entirely outside of it, my relationship to gender has shifted, and I have felt less and less tied to femininity and a feminine gender identity altogether. However, my period that day brought me back into my body as a “woman.” Period pain to me, so tied to reproduction, always feels super ancient. Having cramps while finishing this project, which is so tied up in matrilineality, felt like another way to meditate on the familial and gendered history I was already engaging with. 

When the performance was done, I couldn’t help but cry, with relief, fulfillment, satisfaction, accomplishment, nostalgia, and a deep sense of gratitude for my family and friends and that I have had the opportunity to make work like this. Seeing both quilts next to each other was so moving, and I was incredibly proud. In the film, I say, “this performance started a long time ago…” and that couldn’t be more true. I have never worked so hard and so consistently on any project for this amount of time. It felt like such an incredible achievement, and weight lifted off of me to know I had realized the image that had been living in my head for over a year. However, it was clear to me at that moment that this project had been the culmination of a much longer period of time than I had initially realized, and the words I had already written were more true than I knew when I wrote them. 

In reliving this generational process, I learned a lot. I learned that there is more fertile ground here than I have the time to sow at this time. Quilts themselves are literally layered, and this project has only begun to delve into the depths of all that there is here to consider. There is the quilt as the familiar cultural object: one that evokes nostalgia and family. There is the quilt as an art object: steeped in history, the politics of gender, and considerations of labor. The quilt is a personal object: one of technical skill, introspection, self-realization, and personal history that engages with all other aspects of the quilt’s life. 

For me, the quilt is deeply midwestern, nostalgic, and personal, it reminds me of my grandparents’ house and my grandmother reading me Little House on the Prairie around the same time she taught me to sew. And while engaging with that nostalgia might be mostly self-indulgent, it seems to me now that nostalgia is, in fact, a very powerful form of imagination. Through engaging with these memories, patinated in idyllic retrospection, I began to craft a utopic version of what the future might be. In meditating on these visions, I was able to identify what exactly about them I valued so much, what had built this quilt up so much in my mind, and what of that was essential to carry forward with me. In creating this work, I solidified for myself how important having a community is, how vital caring for one another is, how important valuing labor (emotional, creative, and productive) is to me, and how important taking time to reflect and be grateful for all that you have and have been given by those who came before you is. 

This project would not exist without the many many gifts I have been afforded by my family’s circumstances that expand beyond not just the quilt. What a privilege to have such a large family so present in my life, to have such a strong sense of home, to have a family in one place for so long, to have a relationship with my family be such a positive influence in my life. Of course, not to say that things have always been perfect, they certainly have not, but it is not lost on me how rare and special it is to have such strong roots and a support system like mine. We are all products of our communities and our families, and how lucky I am to be a product of mine. To have gone through this process and embodied the labor of making this quilt, I could place myself even just a little bit into my mother’s shoes as she was pregnant with her first child and wanting to make something to pass on to that child. What does it mean to love someone you haven’t even met yet that much?

So, in the end, what have I done here? Maybe I haven’t completed some grand theoretical feat though I think I have pushed and elaborated on some textiles theories in meaningful ways. Here are my hopes: I hope that I’ve made a performance that will make people feel and think. I hope I have made a beautiful object potent in its many potential meanings. I hope I have honored my community. That all feels a bit beyond me. What I know is that this project and this process has been more valuable to me than I ever could have anticipated. I have meditated on some core parts of myself that I had perhaps taken a bit for granted. And in many ways, I feel like I have come full circle.