RAE
HELLER
- i miss when it was good
- YOU STILL CAN
- on (dis)connection
- on grief
- on gender
- baby quilts
- wearable art
- quilt piecing
- hardedge, softedge
- XO Deo
About
CV
Statement
Contact
My art attempts to hold the complexity of multiple, and often opposing truths, in the same heartbeat—grief and joy, despair and hope, connection and distance, heartbreak and relief. I keep coming back to this impossible task because it is a part of the human experience, and an antidote to binary thinking, which forces us to choose between poles without acknowledging the nuance in between.
In this way, quilts are like gender, holders of multiple truths. They are both an everyday object and extraordinary holders of spirit; a breathing thing that is both and neither and something else completely. People ask if my art is craft or fine art. As a genderqueer person, attempts to establish resolutes of either/or amuses and excites me. In art as in life, complication is the conduit to radical transcendence.
Fabric holds this reverb of simultaneity well. The repurposed textiles I use have their own stories, have lived a life or multiple lives, told by variations of vibrant colors and textures. Quilts, unconstrained by a canvas dimension, become the shape and size the spirit of the work requires. This sustainable art practice offers a cycle of giving and receiving materials, a microcosm of a meaningful life. Aliveness finds weight and heft when framed by the fact of death.
What began as a craft to make for new life has become something bigger. Quilting is a constant bothand. Rooted in lineage, in histories, I’m held in a craft tradition much larger than myself, as I become more myself. My art endeavors to encapsulate these multitudes, to offer the viewer a container for their transcendent and most human needs.