On using text in quilts
Hello :)
I’ve been thinking about using text in quilts recently so I thought I’d share some of what’s been running around inside my brain. Sometimes I feel restricted by using a visual-only mode of communication and I like to bring words into the mix, although that limit can have its benefits - more on that later.
The first quilts with text that I came across were those made by British artist Tracey Emin. Emin rose to fame with her unmade bed installation, so I feel it’s an interesting development for her to continue onto making actual bedding - and her quilts are incredible. To me they feel like the love child of Basquiat and the Gees Bend quilters. At times, you can hear Emin’s inner monologue (‘my brain’s all split up’, ‘I don’t expect to be a mother, I do expect to die alone’) others, nasty things that people have said to her or that she’s overheard (‘I hate women like you’). It feels very direct and intense, a feeling that is enhanced by the prominence of the text in her quilts.
Then a few years later, I went to the V&A quilt exhibition (which was a hugely formative experience for me!) and was blown away by the Wandsworth Prison Quilt. Each hexagon was embroidered by a different inmate and some feature heart-wrenching, vulnerable words such as ‘I will go home’, ‘time moves slowly’ and ‘back to your cell.’ Each hexagon is the same size, so the design feels quieter than Emin’s style, but I like the unimposing style here, and it draws a parallel with how inmates voices are heard in society - which is to say, not much.
Chawne Kimber is a quilter from the US and uses text a lot in her work to raise awareness of racial issues, often quite simply with one phrase which really adds impact. I remember actually holding my breath the first time I saw what she wrote on one quilt: ‘in essence, I am a sophisticated cotton picker.’ Whoa. In one sentence, she manages to distill so much, which I’m still trying to unpick as a white person.
So far, I’ve only used text in small doses in my quilts, more as an added detail to add meaning to the piece. Sometimes it’s a quote I’ve read or heard in music, sometimes it’s something I’ve thought of. Recently, I decided to use a line from Li-Young Lee’s ‘Blossoms’ poem: ‘There are days we live as if death were nowhere in the background’. The quilt in question, ‘Pink Moon’, tells a story of a blissful day, perfect weather, the chance to connect with old friends in nature under the backdrop of the war unfolding in Ukraine and Putin threatening nuclear warfare. Overall, it feels quite playful and childlike, with colourful mushrooms dotted about and naive little faces looking up at the moon, so I felt it needed some text to add a layer of questioning and keep the piece from being too saccharine.
On ‘Guy in a boilersuit playing the piano’, I was trying to convey a magical sense of disorientation that I felt one day getting off the train, in work mode, to find a man in council overalls playing some exquisite music piano in Brighton station. The contrast between his workaday outfit and the music, added to the disruption of my expectations of someone in a boilersuit (I’m sorry to say), created this almost psychedelic moment of connection with him - try getting that into a quilt! So I picked a line from Alice in Wonderland that goes like this: ‘I know who I was when I got up this morning but I think I must have been changed several times since then.’ To add to the sense of disorientation, I added strips of flowers in different directions and chose brownish colours that reminded me of an end-of-summer garden going over, passing into a different state.
Having said I like text in art, I feel it can sometimes be overly powerful and draw too much attention away from other elements - especially in my paintings. Text can be very specific (although it can bring a lot of chaos too). You might want to retain a high level of abstraction in which case text wouldn’t be appropriate.
I’ll leave you with some further reading - which I haven’t bought yet, but I’m itching to get it: check out Sara impey’s Text in Textile Art. It’s published by Batsford who always produce great textile art books.