Salvage Work | Urban Arts Space | MFA Thesis Show | Columbus, OH

Exhibition Statement

A quilt is an object whose first purpose is to touch, to serve as a proxy skin. It is a gentle membrane with a commitment to warm and protect the body. My mother had a quilt, made by her grandmother, that she used as a bedspread throughout her childhood. She told me that she would lay on her stomach on the quilt and look into it for hours, tracing the tender seams with her fingers. 

Though I am moved by its qualities of care, a quilt is made through means of rupture. Like the cutting up and sewing back together of a head in surgery, making a quilt brings together a series of fractures through the act of puncturing, a gesture that is at once violent and tender, piercing, lancing, and pulling patches together. It is like a suture, pulling together the edges of a wound. In my studio I make drawings from my mother’s quilt. It outlived my great-grandmother and my father.

Last March, the doctor told my parents that the only options left were salvage treatment. 

Salvage is rescue work; saving something that has been wrecked. It means picking up the pieces of something that has been broken apart. Putting pieces of what remains back together. Salvage refers to a breaking point, a point of devastation. Something is wrought and torn a part. Having to salvage marks that the worst has already happened. 

The selvage on a length of fabric is the bound edge produced on a woven fabric during manufacturing that prevents it from unraveling. It is made from different or heavier threads, or sometimes it is simply a different weave. It holds the fabric together, keeping it from stretching until thread can come in to bind edges or stitch stays. The first step of a seamstress is to cut off the selvage, but until then it is there, holding together. 

The skin of my dad’s head, that layer wrapping around and padding his skull, was a landscape of cuts, scars, moles, and shiny patches. It had been parceled up, radiated, sewn back together. After he died I laid my head next to his. I traced the deep scar on the right side of his head from his first surgery. 

His body was taken out from our house by the funeral home. They put him on a gurney that was covered with a patchwork quilt. My mother used the honeycomb quilt made by her grandmother as a bedspread throughout her childhood. She told me that she would lay on her stomach on the quilt and look into it for hours, tracing the tender seams with her fingers. I drew the quilt and allowed it to morph and expand into a landscape, trying to document the means of rupture by which it was made. Like the cutting up and sewing back together of a head in surgery, making a quilt brings together a series of fractures through the act of puncturing, a gesture that is at once violent and tender, piercing, lancing, and pulling patches together. It is like a suture, bringing together the edges of a wound. Now the quilt has outlived both my great-grandmother and my father.