I use traditional sewing, quilting and soft sculpture techniques to recontextualize themes of comfort, memory, and gender. I use found fabrics to investigate my relationship to desire and intimacy. The fabrics I reclaim have stains, stitches, and other marks that hold memory of their past lives. I think of intimacy both as a past experience and fantasy future. I relate to José Muños’ notion that “Queerness is an ideality. Put another way, we are not yet queer. We may never touch queerness but we can feel it. The future is queerness’ domain.” By materializing desire, I investigate the visual properties of what makes a queer object, and how this object can be felt.
Textiles allow us to define our own shape. In Jeanne Vaccarro’s “Felt Matters”, Vaccarro describes transgender as handmade. Quilts for me exist as a narrative object. By using craft processes that are associated with “women’s work” and domestic labor, I am able to quilt objects that recontextualize gendered expectations in a gendered material. When a person is wrapped up in a quilt, it both abstracts the quilt pattern and renders the body anonymous. I often incorporate ‘gender neutral appendages’ to question how much or how little is needed to articulate the body. When enveloped in a quilt, the textiles behave as “the first house of the body” (Ann Hamilton) while also fracturing the patchwork of the quilt. How does this fractured pattern play with shape to materialize gender euphoria?
When enveloped in a quilt we also experience comfort. My work discusses touch and is often touchable. At times, I create interactive textile objects as a vessel for curiosity and play as a means to (re)connect to queer desire. This desire is not always sexual, but is always rooted in a sense of belonging.
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SM is based on Dakhóta land Minneapolis, Minnesota.