I am excited to tell you all about a new project I am starting. I am calling it, “The Family Memorial Quilt Project” (unless or until I come up with a better title – suggestions welcome). I come from a very large extended family, full of strong, independent women, many of whom are, or were quilt makers or did other arts and crafts. This project is my way of honoring them and my upbringing. Part art project and part oral history, I plan to rely on my background in anthropology to delve into the history of memorial quilts in America. I will also incorporate themes of family history, means of traditional knowledge transfer, the decaying social safety net and childhood memory throughout the course of this project.

Background on my work and the genesis of the project

“Survival” photo Jay York

A few years back I made my first altered book, “Survival” out of a 1950’s era Army Survival Manual (forgive me Royce, Clair, and Wade but I couldn’t find a Corps Manual of similar vintage anywhere) as a memorial quilt for my father, Darrell. It took 6 weeks to pull apart the pages, cut them into strips, dip them in wax, color them with pigment sticks and hand sew them all back together into a log cabin crib quilt. The 6 week process afforded me the time to think about my father, grieve for him and work through our rather complicated relationship in a way that I had not given myself the time to do previously. Ever since then I’ve been intrigued by memorial quilts and have wanted to make more. However given the demands of a part-time day job and the soreness of my hands afterwards I didn’t envision repeating the process anytime soon. Nonetheless the quilt motif took over my work from that point forward.

I tend to produce artwork in series and the work naturally evolves as I make more variations from the initial idea – I try to improve both the work and the process as I go. The quilt pieces I was making were on steel and copper using encaustic monotypes (prints made by melting wax on a heated aluminum plate and pressing the paper onto the plate to ‘pull’ a print) for the mediums and darks and things like book pages and newspapers for the light parts of the ‘quilt’.   I collaged the cut pieces of prints and book pages together and covered them in a layer of wax then incised back into the wax to indicate the stitching. As the work evolved I began actually sewing the pieces together by hand on quilt batting stretched on a quilt loop, eventually adding hand embroidery. Then, after my hands started really hurting, I finally remembered I had a sewing machine! As I was running pieces through the machine and noticing how fabric-like the individual squares of paper felt (squares which I would then mount on steel or copper) I was once again drawn back to the idea of the memorial quilt.   Around the same time I noticed that my copy of “The Joy of Cooking” was falling apart – which instantly brought to mind my great-aunt Gracie. I always associate her with food (she was a wonderful cook and quilter and I loved her dearly) and in my head appeared a barn-raising log cabin quilt made from the pages of the book:

“Joy of Cooking (For Gracie)” photo Jay York

My work has largely been about family history and I have always wanted to do a project that more deeply explored my unique childhood. I think that even as I child I understood how unusual an upbringing it was; I grew up in the same house as my great grandfather, a man who was told he was too old to fight in WWI, my grandparents lived next door, and within a few blocks lived 5 sets of great aunts and uncles.   From this realization, the project began to form in my mind.

Next Friday’s post will cover more of the details of the project; the who’s and the what’s.