SHAPED QUILTS (2025–)

Quilting accumulates history via 'off-cut' materials, otherwise known as scraps. Scraps are always associative, connected with people and their lives through the wear and relation they've experienced, and connected to their former formations through productive labour. While patchwork may only be an aesthetically-driven strategy, on spiritual and memorial levels, this bringing together of materials creates known and unknown associations, alliances, and tensions between the invisible matter contained by the fabrics.

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I keep a scrap archive, in which I diarise and number each fabric I use, and document their various appearances in clothes and quilts I’ve made, as well as noting their origin forms and other available information I have and remember. This is a personal provenance-building exercise, where provenance is, to me, the recognition of value in normal, touched histories, rather than in relation to externally-determined economies that often seem to value distance and a lack of touch (preservation).

For example, scrap 005, a batch of white cotton backings of secondhand curtains procured on Louis Botha (and which I dyed pink) exists in After Library garments 005, 007, and 010, as well as in SHAPED QUILTS 002 and 003, and the "wearable" SHAPED QUILT 008. 

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As with a family unit, the scraps or pieces of a quilt are in dialogue and relation with one another, creating an overall dynamic and communication style, which may be replete with inner contrast or contradiction or harmony, or beauty, or all of these things together.

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In a conversation with Yonela Makoba, who calls their teabag works ‘quilts’, they talked to me about quilting histories associated with the Underground Railroad, an organised network of transport routes and safe houses assisting enslaved people in the United States Chattel Slavery era, in their escape — certain quilting blocks or patterns functioned as coded messages to communicate the presence of on-route safe houses, instructions for the next leg of the journey, indications that a certain individual was an ally, etc.

Quilts are also historically women’s work, associated with histories like Gees Bend, a black farming community in the US south on a former cotton plantation, in which women quilters went on to join the Freedom Quilting Bee, a quilting co-operative, which extended their quilting work from a domestic warmth and beauty-making craft, to a practice valued by a broader art community for its improvised, asymmetric styles of pattern making.

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So quilting (an apparently innocent womanly pastime) has historically, covertly sometimes, co-occured with processes of liberation, escape, and return, even travelling to Liberia with formerly enslaved emancipated women from the US, who saw Africa as their promised land in the mid 1900s. But practically, it has origins everywhere — in ancient Egypt for tunics, vesting, in Mongolia and China, as armour for horsemen, and more generally, as a practice that, through its careful patchwork, savours textile as valuable material that exists because of expensive processes — expensive as in laborious, as in time-consuming processes.

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