RAE
HELLER
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My grandmother Sarah was a quilt maker and craftswoman. When her daughters started having children, she started making baby quilts for them, and eventually for all new children born into the family and neighborhood. Each different, and progressively expressive of her own individual style, the quilts somehow also reflected the unknowable quality of each individual's new life. Networks and generations of close and distant family and friends are connected by these first gifts of life.
In April 2021, anticipating the first new baby in our family since her death, I learned to quilt. I fell in love with the physicality of textiles and the opportunity to apply my art making processes in a new medium.
Life
Fabric has a life span. This is important to me. I work mostly with repurposed textiles that have been thrifted at Swanson's Fabrics in Turners Fall, Massachusetts. Fabric that moves through Swansons has already lived a life or multiple lives. The variation of colors and origins is a miracle to me. A sustainable art practice offers a cycle of giving and receiving materials, a microcosm of a meaningful life.
Death
What began as a craft to make for new life has become a pathway for processing grief. I find this duality– celebrating life and processing death– in the durable softness of creating quilts. My current focus is making brightly colored, large scale quilts. The process is a balm. Working with the more saturated and vibrant colors of fabric, and unconstrained by a canvas dimension, the physicality of textiles and the ability to wrap myself in art has sustained my spirit in a world becoming more complicated and difficult to bear, not less. My attention to the work keeps me present. I follow where the sadness and joy lead.
Breath
My work is in duality. I want to breathe where multiple truths exist; where aliveness is heightened alongside death, that connection can exist with distance, that a decision can hold grief for the choice not taken. Quilts help hold these for me.