Loss:
An exhibition of quilts
Penny
Gold
August
20, 2016 at The Box, Galesburg, Illinois
Many
of you know that I came to quilting from a background in craftwork:
knitting, crocheting, and sewing. Most of
the quilts that I make are part of that tradition, based on a pattern by
someone else. But in 2005, in a design
workshop taught by Bill Kerr and Weeks Ringle, the possibility opened
for me that I would make art, abstract art, and that the making of art
would be a means for me to endure life in the wake of the death a year
before of my son Jeremy.
As
an appreciative viewer of art, I had long been drawn to abstract art, to
artists like Paul Klee, Mark Rothko, Sol Lewitt, Franz Kline, Sonia
Delaunay, and Joan Mitchell. The play of
line, shape, and color, removed from explicit subject matter, appealed
deeply to me, though I didn't reflect on the nature of the appeal.
Now, through the making of abstract art myself, and through
reading writings by abstract practitioners, I have come to understand
its appeal, and why it has served me well in the making of this series
of quilts.
Through
much of the history of art, art has been in a direct relationship to the
natural, material world, representing that world in all manner of ways.
Art has come from seeing, sometimes from direct observation, or
often from the recollection or response to something seen.
Most works of art had a subject matter that could be
identified. Abstract art broke from this tradition, excluding explicit,
recognizable subject matter. But for many
abstract artists, this does not mean that the art comes from a purely
intellectual exercise of figuring out relationships between shapes and
colors. Even while works of abstract art
have no identifiable content, and even though many artists leave work
untitled, the work still originates in a subject. In
a 1943 manifesto, Mark Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb wrote:
"There is no such thing as good painting about nothing.
We assert that the subject matter is crucial and that only that
subject matter is valid which is tragic and timeless" [John Golding, Paths
to
the Absolute: Mondrian, Malevich, Kandinsky, Pollock, Newman, Rothko,
and Still (Washington, DC: The National Gallery of Art, 2000),
157].
What
is the subject, if it's not visible? Agnes
Martin, who did canvas after abstract canvas of lines and grids,
identifies the subject of art as emotion: "Art
is about emotion and emotions are abstract." Art,
she said, "is not what is seen, it is what is known
forever in the mind" [emphasis mine]. Barnett
Newman, another great abstract artist, wrote that an abstract shape
could be "a living thing, a vehicle for an abstract thought-complex, a
carrier of awesome feelings."
The
absence of material subject matter allows for the
expression of something internal to the artist, rather
than external--it opens up the space for the expression of emotion.
This is not to say that emotion is absent from figural art, but
the emotion is intertwined with the viewer's recognition of and
relationship to the material world represented. In
abstract art, emotion has center stage.
The
focus on emotion means that the work is also deeply personal, an
expression of oneself. Clyfford Still said,
"I paint only myself, not nature" (Clyfford Still quoted in Golding,
174). And Agnes Martin: "Work is
self-expression. We must not think of
self-expression as something we may do or something we may not do.
Self-expression is inevitable." Inevitable,
perhaps, but it also takes awareness. Martin
again: "While working and in the work I must be on the alert to see
myself. When I see myself in the work I
will know that that is the work I am supposed to do."
*
* * *
In
the year after Jeremy died, I wrote in a journal every morning, trying
to exorcise my grief, fury, regret through the written word.
Writing was what I knew, what I had long done.
But it didn't help. Again, Agnes
Martin: "It is commonly thought that everything that is, can be put into
words. But there is a wide range of
emotional response . . . that cannot be put into words."
Once I began to work on quilts about loss, I never went back to
the journal writing. Working with shape and
color gave me a channel through which to express what I was feeling.
And the resulting work made the feeling physically
visible--very different from pages of written words.
I didn't have to go searching through pages of a journal to
find something I'd written that may have captured my feelings.
Once a quilt was done, I could simply recall the quilt, whole.
And the making of the quilts, each of which took a year or
more, gave me an extended experience of living and re-living the
emotional content, all the while building a readily available archive of
the self.
As
I worked on "Loss," the first quilt of this kind that I made, I had no
idea whether there would be other quilts of its kind.
But before I finished "Loss," the idea for "Shelter" came to
me, a kind of companion piece to "Loss." And
from
there, one idea after another began to accumulate, a clamor of ideas.
It has taken me eleven years to complete the eleven quilts in
the series. The actual putting together of
a quilt might take as little as a couple of weeks, but thinking about
the design, and working out final details of design and execution
through extended trials took place over years, for each of them.
About
the layout of the quilts in the exhibition: The
quilts are not in the order they were made, except for the first and
last quilts in the main room. The first
"Accident" quilt, though not made until 2015, is placed at the entry-way
to the exhibit, to put the other work in the context of the event that
generated the series. The rest of the
quilts were placed to enhance the visual relationships between them.
The booklet provides details about the story of each quilt--its
making and meaning--in relationship to others. The
wall of small quilts in the reception area gives you a glimpse at the
making process of some quilts, as well as ideas that didn't find their
way into a larger work.
When
most artists work in a series, the series is united by a cohesive style
and method of production, so the works all look closely related.
My series is united not by style but by the subject matter,
which is the multiple facets of my response to loss.
Each idea demanded its own design process, with a fresh start
each time about how I could best express the particular idea.
Different as they are, I think you can see the same hand at
work, at the underlying mission: to make visible the chasm of death as
well as the possibility of solace.
Now
the series is complete. There are no more
ideas lined up in my head. When I began the first quilt in 2005, I
didn't know if more ideas would come. Then, in the middle of things, I
didn't know if ideas would stop. But for
over a year now, no new ideas have come forward. This
feeling of a major project being done is recognizable to me from my life
as a scholar, from the two major books I wrote. Each
of those books took a dozen years from conception to completed
manuscript. They were each the result of a
complex, multi-faceted research program, each generated from a question
that I felt compelled to answer. Each book
was done when I had answered that question to my own satisfaction.
And each time a book was done, I went on to a totally different
project--that is, rather than continuing with a related question, I
embarked on something else. With this
series of quilts, I have put out into the world, as best I can, what
there has been in me to say. There are no
more angles to cover. This doesn't mean
that my deep sense of loss is over, just that I have said what I can
about it.