Family Secrets, in situ at the Chronic Exhibition in 2023. Five of the vessels were crafted from a quilt top that was in the 60s made from our family’s old clothes.
photo by Summer Raine Young
Family Secrets
Family Secrets is a group portrait of my nuclear family. I used an unfinished quilt top that my mother commissioned from our old clothes to make the vessels. The rickety-looking wire towers express the way I was reframing the knowledge that both of my parents had undiagnosed mental health issues that limited their ability to provide comfort and stability at home. When it showed as part of my Chronic exhibition in 2023 so many gallery visitors had cathartic conversations about their own Family Secrets that I planned to show it again in Antifunction.
Just a few weeks before Antifunction was set to open at Mesa Contemporary Arts Museum, we got the agonizing news that my brother Andy had killed himself. His death gave the work even more meaning for me, and yet I still needed to revise parts of Family Secrets to help process my grief and anger over Andy's lost battle with bipolar disorder II. For him, his illness often manifested as suicidal ideation and difficulties with his family and friends. When I originally made Family Secrets, Andy's vessel handle had barbed wire on it, which reflected the prickly nature of our adult relationship. As we learned more about the weeks leading up to my brother’s death, I began to see those barbs not as an essential part of Andy, but as a symbols of the ways his illness affected his thinking and behavior. I added barbs to the wires on his tower to make my new understanding of Andy’s struggles concrete.
September is national suicide prevention month
National Suicide Prevention Month is a time to remember the lives lost to suicide, acknowledge the millions more who have experienced suicidal thoughts, and the many individuals, families and communities who have been affected by suicide.
If you are feeling distressed and need to talk to a counselor, please call The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255). The 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline accepts phone calls and texts. Just dial 988 to talk with them.
Family Quilt
For many of my pieces, I make quilts from dyed, painted or hand-printed fabric that I design to suit the subject of the piece. But five of the vessels in Family Secrets were made from an unfinished quilt top that a woman from our rural Baptist church made from our worn out clothes. Three other works in Antifunction also came from that same quilt top:
Salvage
Mrs. Atlas Shrugged
Refactored
That quilt top has sentimental value for me, but also has conceptual weight as an art supply. Miz Frona, as we church kids called the quilt top's maker, must have spent 200 hours cutting up our clothes into 2" squares and then hand-stitching them into 7" blocks (set on the diagonal no less—ask a quilter how that makes every part of the process harder) and finally stitching those blocks into a twin-sized quilt top.
Even as I ripped out some Miz Frona's tiny hand stitching to separate blocks into piles for several different artworks, I wanted to show as much of her labor as possible. So when I made the quilted yardage from her quilt top, I turned the blocks upside down, so that the hand-stitched seams could show through my machine-stitched quilting.
I started using parts of this quilt top for my 2022 exhibition, called Salvage. The theme of that show was reconfiguring old things to give them new value. The vessel Salvage (also showing in Antifunction) was the namesake of the show and the first piece I made from Miz Frona's quilt. The textiles were over 50 years old and had been cut on the bias, so there was lots of fraying on the seams. When the top was quilted, I used a wire brush to fray the edges even more. Then I cut deep fissures into the vessel form and "repaired" the breach with needle lace to see how much damage a form could take and still hold its shape.
Refactored has a longer history of reconfiguration. Using parts of Miz Frona's quilt, I made a three-piece grouping for the Salvage show. Then this year, I cut those pieces up and made the form shown in Antifunction.
Mrs. Atlas Shrugged is a joyous piece for me. It's part of my "emotional labor" series, where I explore what it feels like to stop doing the emotional work other folks should be doing for themselves.
Unused quilt blocks from Miz Frona’s original quilt top. They’ve been overdyed with a light green dye to unify the colors. You can see her tiny hand-stitching on the squares on the right side of the photo.
Salvage, 2022
Refactored, 2024
Mrs. Atlas Shrugged, 2024