My first several series of vessels had no metal armature holding them up, but they all used some variety of stiffener in the quilt sandwich. I’d typically use buckram, which is a chemically-stiffened linen or other loose weave textile. This buckram was hidden between the cotton batting that gives a quilt it’s loft and the backing fabric that you’ll see inside my forms. For the smaller forms, I’d use a paste of methyl cellulose since it’s archival and dries clear. After I finished a normal quilt (just the decorative quilt top, cotton batting and a backing fabric), I’d use a sqeegee to press the thick paste into the backing fabric and let it dry before I cut the pattern pieces for my forms.

But since I wanted the new forms to be larger than my earlier work, I reluctantly decided to use fabric-wrapped wire to help the pieces stand up and hold the shapes I wanted. I say “reluctantly” because I wanted the pieces to be truthful. Put another way, I didn’t want them to have false facades that hid their structure. That felt like cheating to me, the same way MacMansions with fake stone fronts feel like frauds since they’re not really built with stone.

But once I accepted the need to use structure to support the textile forms, I realized that making the wire a feature of the form had several benefits. It was a step closer to honest construction, and because it’s no longer hidden it can present new concepts in my work.

Making the Invisible Visible

Mrs. Atlas Shrugged is the first piece I created for this series. It represents what happened to me internally and externally when I stopped doing other people’s emotional labor for them if they weren’t willing to meet me with equivalent emotional labor. I could never have become an artist while I was still trying to solve problems I didn’t create and couldn’t fix. This process wasn’t quick and it came with a lot of pain because some folks thought I was unfair and mean-spirited when I started setting labor boundaries.

People with a national platform openly cry out that creating new people and then spending your life making them comfortable is womens’ primary purpose. You don’t count and you can’t have a “direct stake” in this county if you aren’t doing gender-specific physical and emotional labor. Enter Childless Cat Lady. The pedestal for that piece took seven work days to build the form and wrap each wire with custom-dyed fabric strips. Spending that much time on a support made my choice of labor very visible and tangible, if only for me.

For First Sight, Second Thoughts, I used the striding contrapasto of Rodin’s Monument to Balzac as my inspiration. I wanted to make a portrait of a woman of a certain age, who’s put in her time and now wears her mantle of responsibilities lightly and with panache.