Structure | Resistance

String quilting is a type of patchwork that is fastened and constructed with a base layer. My mom’s good friend, Melissa, introduced it to me several years ago. It allows a sewist to use small bits of fabric easily, without having to work with finicky, slippery pieces. The scraps are sewn to the base layer one at a time, pressed open, then attached to the next. The final effect is of “stripes”, or “strings” on the blocks, which can then be combined to become the quilt top, the understructure supporting the surface.
 
I find winter months difficult, a mental and emotional doldrum. It’s an interior slowness and darkness that I often don’t identify until I am through it. It manifests as tiredness, worry, anxiety, discontent, annoyance, frustration. This February I started attending a spin class at our gym. The bikes have a red knob beneath the handlebars that is called the “gear” or “resistance”, which controls how much effort it takes to push the pedals of the bike. Throughout an instructed class, you increase and decrease the resistance to mimic a real ride with hills, open roads, and climbs. At the end of my first class, I heard the woman next to me telling the instructor “something just doesn’t feel right, it feels scary to pedal downward”, and the teacher said “you probably need to turn up your resistance.”
 
Twice this spring I gave presentations on quilts, first a talk on historic quilts, second, an artist talk about my own recent series of quilts. In both instances, audience members commented on the quality of “resistance”. It is not a word I had considered when crafting the talks. I saw them as nuanced exploration of material, expressions of creativity, thoughtful gestures of love and attention. Yet maybe those acts are the nature of resisting.
 
I’m often straining against the structure of motherhood, trying to break out of it, trying and failing to make it bend to my will. I’m disappointed when I can’t go to the gym because Charlie is running a fever and frustrated when he won’t nap or go to sleep at night because it is my only guaranteed time alone.
 
In his book Domestic Monastery priest and theologian Ronald Rolheiser tells the story of Carlo Carretto, an Italian Catholic priest, who as a young man retreated to the Sahara Desert and lived as a hermit for nearly twelve years seeking solitude, prayer, and spiritual refinement. When he returned to his home in Italy to visit his mother, he was startled to find that his mother, who had spent thirty years raising her children with hardly any time for herself “was more contemplative than he was.” Rolheiser continues saying “He had been in a monastery, but so had she”. I find great comfort in those words, the idea that there is something happening under the surface that is enlarging my heart.
 
My friend Astri Snodgrass, an artist with a thoughtful eye, hand, and mind for material, introduced me to text from David Levi Strauss’ book From Head to Hand: Art and the Manual that discusses the distinction made by Reg Davidson between convention and tradition, “two words that are often used interchangeably, but are in fact contradictory. Conventional art does nothing but repeat conventions, whether old or recent. Traditional art, on the other hand, is involved in the transformation of substance within a context, the ‘carrying over’ of substance from the past to the future. There can be no real change without tradition.” There is something happening in the interaction of structure, resistance, and creativity that I find playing out in my life as an artist and life as a mother.
 
There is a particular quilt in Roderick Kiracofe’s book Unconventional and Unexpected that is a Spiderweb quilt top pattern, made in Oklahoma between 1920-1940. It is made of dozens of striped octagons, radiating in rings from a center point. I was unfamiliar with the pattern, but then saw that the back of the quilt top was also pictured in the book. From the back I could see that it was a string quilt, scraps striped onto triangles, arranged in squares, composed into spiderwebs.   
 
In moments that happen only once in a while, I’m able to lean into the resistance. My spin instructor yells “ride”, “fly”, and my legs push faster and stronger than I thought they knew how.
 
Sources:
 
Kiracofe, Roderick. Unconventional & Unexpected: American Quilts Below the Radar 1950-2000. United States: Harry N. Abrams, 2014, 120.
Rolheiser, Ronald. Domestic Monastery. United States: Paraclete Press, Incorporated, 2022, 17.
Strauss, David Levi. From Head to Hand: Art and the Manual. United Kingdom: Oxford University Press, USA, 2010, 46.

 
See the Spiderweb quilt top in Roderick Kiracofe’s collection in the International Quilt Museum Archive