Pain, A Tattered Spine

The first Ironing Board Hologram I made, in my South Slocan Studio in 2002, was a year after moving to Nelson. I’d found an old wooden ironing board in a second hand goods store (where Itza Pizza now exists), covered in layers of cigarette smoke-infused sheets, which when washed, turned into exquisite tatters with water stains that looked like topographical maps. Of the West Kootenay, I presumed. I made many compositions of this tattered cloth contained by wooden boxes I constructed for them. 

For Upstream Benefits I proposed to use a tattered quilt that is over 100 years old, made by my grandmother, Mary Katherine Grace. I wanted to make that quilt either stand on its own (ergo the spine of the title) or make a piece that is an elegy to that quilt and its maker. Or both. 

The quilt could only ‘stand’ with the help of bundling and sutures to hold in the ruptures and tatters it has suffered over the last century. The help of a recumbent cross that ironically references a headstone became a spine as the upright cross I’d planned put too much pressure on the quilt’s fragility. The Scarred Heart in the folds of the spiritual flow of silk organza through the quilt/body reflects the faith of my grandmother; the ubiquitous Sacred Heart of Jesus Christ was on her funeral card. A concrete and silk uterus with a silk fallopian tube on a shelf facing the quilt communicates across generations. Glass risers, tulle, and light represent joy and pain that ground a marriage, no matter how tattered by pain.