Home: what does it mean to you? This theme has become more and more important to my practice, so I invited poets to respond to the prompt: “Write about the people or places you consider home.” While each poet responded in a unique way, bringing their own style and voice, the connecting thread between us is that we’re reconnecting with our individual senses of home and belonging. The other side of that coin is the displacement we have felt. For myself, quilting has become a therapeutic method of working through past religious trauma. I felt the steps involved—from prepping the material, to carefully measuring and cutting, to piecing and stitching together disparate parts to form a contiguous whole—metaphorically replicated my own sense of dislocation from the people I once considered home and how I am slowly piecing myself back together. What makes this work different is that I sourced my material, not from a fabric store, but from asking the poets to handwrite their poems on paper of their choosing. This slower method of collaboration allowed me to feel their writing and respond in a way that honored their material as best I could. It is my hope that viewers likewise be allowed a chance to consider home and what makes them feel both displaced, but also stitched together.
Collaborating Poets:
Photo credits: Raj Mehta, Sierra Aguilar, & Sydney R. Jordan