Susan Andrews Grace

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The Narrow Good: Artist Statement

The Narrow Good is a work-in-progress of 100 textile constructions begun in 1995. The first installation Pneuma, was exhibited at The Snelgrove Gallery, University of Saskatchewan, Teachers Exhibition of Quilt Canada in 1996. The second, Stick Quilts, was shown at Quilt Show '97 at the Lambton Heritage Museum, Grand Bend, ON in 1997. The third, 68 pieces, called Narrow Good: A Serial Poem was shown at McCarran International Airport, at the C Gates in Las Vegas, NV, USA in 1999.

Narrow goods are braids, ribbons and similar woven articles, notions of the material sort. The pieces in The Narrow Good are notions of an ideational sort: textile/mixed-media pieces which centre upon the breadth of lifetimes which have existed in the margins of history and in particular, those burnt alive.

All pieces are narrow: none are wider than 6 inches and some are as long as 3 feet. Some are very narrow quilts, which are then shaped with stitches, as lifetimes are sometimes shaped in peaceful obscurity.  Some of these are wrapped on a slat. Others are burnt cloth, stabilized and 'bandaged', on wooden slats and shims then double-wrapped with voile which shimmers like a nylon historical consciousness or gasoline slick on a puddle of ditch water. This is a textu(r)al talking around historical events and the lives which skirted them: the many women burnt over the last two millennia. The shims are sandwiched in glass which is also made by fire.

Techniques used are traditional quilt-piecing and hand-quilting, wrapping, burning, 'healing' of cloth with methyl cellulose and 'bandaging' with gauze. Materials used are cottons, (some hand-dyed with indigo), nylon voile, gauze, wooden shims and slats, an antique quilt fragment and glass.

Previous installations of The Narrow Good focused on the individual pieces. This one, Narrow Good: Internment, will collect discrete objects in black boxes, putting them to rest. Burnt cloth on shims, which are then double-wrapped with voile, (8 & 9 inches) are mounted on either side of a sheet of glass and then boxed, with glass front and back in a shadow-box like vitrine. The shaped narrow quilts and those on slats will be in traditional shadow boxes.

The boxes contain objects, scraps to represent lives which cast few shadows for us, the living. Unlike the shades of Dante's Inferno, these are not lives judged but lives for which history has not been accountable. They are meant to be ghostly reminders of absence in recorded history, missing stories in the thickness of being and time.