INTERWOVEN (2010)INTERWOVEN (2010)INTERWOVEN (2010)INTERINTEINTERWOVEN (2010-present)

Nearly every birth, death, illness and major life transition at St. Andrew Lutheran Church is marked with a quilt or prayer shawl.  Thousands are made and given to congregation members and community organizations.  They go all over the world. I imagined a thread tied to each of these items, and the resulting net it would create.  My idea was to make that fabric of care visible to St. Andrew.  Both a 1943 article by anthropologist Margaret Mead and the Jewish tradition of building sukkahs (temporary tent-like structures) inspired this idea.  During my one-week residency, I interviewed quilting and crochet groups, and led a workshop on taking portraits of people with fabric items they’ve received. Congregation members of all ages visited and photographed each other in their homes; I am still collecting these images. We also made a one-day installation using the theme of tents.  It needed to be very temporary and inexpensive, so we draped quilt faces in the lobby space and displayed paper-sized quilts made during a workshop with the preschool children.  I continue to work on book of their photographs, and am thinking about another installation of quilt faces to be shown in galleries.  However, the biggest and most meaningful surprise has been that they have embraced the theme “A Fabric of Care” as part of how they talk about their community.  They have adopted this idea and made it their own.