Layers

In 2019, PBS Craft in America aired the episode “Quilts”. The episode opens with footage from a conference expo on National Quilting Day at the International Quilt Museum in Lincoln, Nebraska. A mother and her three kids stand at a table of two seasoned quilters. Matter-of-factly, one of the quilters explains “It’s not a quilt until it’s three pieces. It’s got to be the top, the batting, and the backing.”

For the last several years I’ve included a line in my artist statement that reads “I make quilts, what I view as labored and layered drawings”. The sentence has felt mostly aspirational. In the quilts I have been making recently, it is beginning to feel true.

I began to ponder the idea of layers when I took a ceramics class at Penland School of Craft with the potter Sanam Emami in June of the summer of 2022. Penland is situated just outside of Asheville in the rolling landscape of North Carolina. The class focused on surface, using combinations of glazes, underglazes, slips in painting and transfer techniques. The layer of glaze on the surface of a pot is the thickness of a hair, yet it establishes a visual depth that is endlessly rich.

Many times throughout the two-week workshop, Sanam would point out the windows to the distant hills and talk about their colors, shapes, and textures. On a clear day, there are distinctions: crisp edges, saturated colors. On a cloudy day, or in the misty atmosphere of dawn or dusk, the hills are shrouded in an ever-shifting veil. More subtle than the bright sunshine of day, they possess a different kind of beauty, edges blurred in their transitions. Sanam encouraged us to think about the surfaces of our pots in such a way, and it has begun to be the way I think about quilts. Is it clear? Is it cloudy? Do both ways of seeing meander across the same sky?

Out on walks with Charlie as winter draws close, the sky darkens early. The moon is blanketed in a wisp of cloud. I think about whether it is more beautiful to see the moon white, bright, in stark contrast against an inky night, or to see it softly, in this way. I saw the moon again today, in the late morning as I was driving to work. Even in the light of day, the moon was translucent against the blue sky. That seems to be the moon’s resting state, one of translucency.

In recent work I’ve done the task of quilting, stitching three distinct layers together. I’ve been taken in by the beautiful puckers of small stitches. I’ve played with lots of handwork, patchwork, appliqué, trapunto, running stitches, embroidering, binding. I’ve stitched shapes, shadows, drawings, attempted to build a dense and soft surface, something akin to the glaze on a pot. There are sharp lines and soft lines, thick lines and thin lines. There is layering of images, memories, feelings, daydreams, some quite referential, some very abstract. Some layers are chaotic and exuberant, bordering obsessive. Some are hazy, some barely there. The layers feel prescient, important, representing, materially and metaphorically, the holding of complexity, looking at several things at once, being willing to see them as belonging together.

I get caught, am forced to pause, between or in moments of clarity and moments of uncertainty, an uncertainty that might be better named mystery. Things are clear or clouded, clear and clouded. I often experience it as a feeling of groundedness or groundlessness. In Minnesota we grew up walking on ice. When it was cold it was difficult to see through. The ice was matte, nearly opaque. When the winter weather warmed, snow and ice would melt on the top layer. The ice would become slick and become glossy. Yet you could still see frosted layers under the thick ice, bruised purples, grays, and blues in shadowy movement beneath. As my sisters and I walked across frozen ponds and lakes, we never knew the thickness of the ice, or how deep the water was beneath.

See Sanam Emami’s beautiful pots here.