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Quilt Paintings
Quilts evoke a feeling of security to me. Wrapped inside them, they keep us warm. For me, I’m transported to my childhood of my grandmother creating quilts from our worn-out clothes, watching women sew their love during quilting bees, and walking through dewy grass to hang the quilts out on our clothesline to air them out.
The Katrina Quilt series began as a response to my loss from Hurricane Katrina. The event marked a loss of not only 200 plus paintings, but more importantly a loss of family around the same time, and my struggles of endurance and recovery. As I and my Hancock County community worked at salvaging our lives and culture, I began piecing a new body of work back together one patch at a time. I salvaged parts of the damaged and destroyed paintings and re-imagined them in quilt collages.
Always in times of stress we return to what is familiar, and I turned to memories of my family roots to help me process traumas from H. Katrina. Those memories consisted of my childhood and watching my grandmother and aunt sewing beautifully patterned quilts of memories; frugal nothing was wasted, and new life was discovered from damaged and destroyed fabrics.
Although I never learned the craft, I watched intently and absorbed the process in their warm and loving patterns. During the heat of the summer, they would cut the patchwork from old worn and tattered clothes and leftover fabrics, then hand-sew their pieces together forming larger patterns. In the winter, the formal dining room would disappear amongst the large quilting frame and the quilting bee would begin with the buzz of women talking as they worked. Then and now, a rebirth began happening in front of my eyes.
