RAE 
HELLER



  1. On Grief
  2. On Gender
  3. Baby Quilts
  4. Wearable Art
  5. Quilt Piecing
  6. Hardedge, Softedge
  7. XO Deo


About
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Statement
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Statement
Quilts are like gender. They shape and fold and mend and express and embrace and confuse and become. 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. My quilts are portals–to intimacy, to inspiration, to spirit, to each other, and myself. My art endeavors to encapsulate these multitudes, to offer the viewer a container for their transcendent and most human needs.

My artistic practice lives in the reverb of simultaneity: despair-hope, loss-joy, dis-connection, in-decision – where aliveness finds weight and heft when framed by the fact of death. Fabric holds this reverb 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. 

What began as a craft to make for new life has become something bigger. As a Jewish person, I understand loss as something big, something loud. I am loud. My work takes up space – literally and figuratively. I learned to take up space from my grandmother Sarah, who made quilts for each grandchild as a way to exclaim to the masses “L’chaim (to life)!” The loudness of her bold, fabric-all-over-her-kitchen life led to me continuing this tradition, processing my grief in vivid color as I made my first quilt in 2021, upon the arrival of my cousin’s child–the first of many births following my grandmother’s death. In a sense, piecing together scraps of bright fabric parallels the experience of life flourishing amid profound loss. My quilts are a call to the living–to gather, to touch, to exclaim.