My closet is full of quilts. You’ve heard me say that before, usually with a sigh. So when I started planning for Arlington Open Studios this year, I decided to try something different: I’d pull out an old piece, give it a fancy label (“From the Archives”), and see if a little context would help it find a home. It worked. Mango Tango sold. People stopped at my booth to look at it, and almost everyone was surprised when I told them it was nearly 20 years old.
But the best part happened before the show, while I was digging through the closet to find it. I hadn’t looked at that quilt in years, and when I pulled it out, I remembered the rays. I made it in 2007 for a crayon challenge, and I wanted those rays to lift off the surface, so I bent wire into them. It was my first attempt at pulling fabric off the flat plane. I’d forgotten that completely.
And now that same impulse is behind the sculptural pieces I’m making, Lift and Off the Page. Nothing in my practice was planned that way. I never sat down and decided to move into three dimensions. But lately, I’ve been experimenting with ways to make the cyanotypes I’ve made more interesting and I thought “what if I lift the image off the background?”
Looking back, the wire has been there all along. In 2007 I bent it into rays so they would stand away from the quilt, and I’ve been figuring out what else it can do ever since. I didn’t know I was starting a line of inquiry. I was answering a crayon challenge, and my curiosity just never let go. I think that’s how a practice evolves. You don’t plan it. You follow one small “what if?” and it leads to the next one, and twenty years later you’ve gone somewhere you couldn’t have mapped. The only way to see it is to look back.
If you’re wondering whether your own work is going anywhere, look back at the early pieces. The question you’re asking now may have been there from the beginning.
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