a straight line?

7-19 (The blog is gradually catching up to the experience.)

We watched the Alabama PBS DVD “The Quiltmakers of Gee’s Bend,” each of us moved by this art that starts with next-to-nothing, that communicates vibrancy and joy despite the harsh conditions under which the makers have lived. These ladies, the (until recently) geographically isolated descendants of slaves in Alabama, have made quilts that are bold and visionary in a relaxed, everyday way. One woman interviewed said that she at first couldn’t imagine making a quilt but got started because she had no choice. Her family needed bedclothes to keep them warm. With no money, she picked up her needle and thimble. This woman’s quilts are among the most stunning, in part because she uses scraps that are obviously worn out clothing – many gradations of blue in the jeans with faded knees.

In being inspired by these women we recognize an appetite for the social aspects of the quilting circle - the conversation and singing that take place while they stitch. We have been listening to each other. One aim of Red Thread is to pay attention to how we weave our daily and dancing lives. We seem to naturally begin each morning with a debriefing that veers into a particular subject: our children, our marriages, our parents, caretaking, our relationships with our bodies, our difficulties in carving out sufficient time for our creative work and hewing to “dailiness” - continuous process, especially when not engaged in collaboration or under a deadline. The effect is less kaffeeklatsch than coming clean – airing issues and transmuting their energy from individual burdens and joys to shared understandings to be folded back into the work.

We improvise as a starting place - solos which are “fed back” as duets. I am inspired by Vicky’s physical veracity. She may not know what she is doing in a given moment, but what I see is the her bemused involvement with the movement she is finding, absent any sense of awkwardness about exposure while “not knowing”. I feel more self-consciousness.

What do we do when unsure, not “at home”? Stay loose and awkward? Or pump out movement, repeating an action, maybe part of our bag of tricks, putting oomph behind it that rings false? In this open dancing I see so much of who we are. Even without langauge, without having made something composed, there is a complete transmission of personality. The idea that we have to be "clothed" with worthy material is suspect. The three of us agree on this: it's not so much what you do as how you do it.

We pored over “The Architecture of the Quilt,” the catalog for the Gee’s Bend quilters’ show that was in Baltimore last winter. (It’s coming to Philadelphia in September). How strong the choices are – to put a bunch of big, nearly same-shaped squares around a block of a bunch of little bitty ones, to have three rows of four blocks of a pattern all in parallel lines and then the fourth row slid off that grid. To use blacks and whites and subtle colors over an entire quilt and then place two little bits of red, one on the side edging, one in a tiny square. Most striking is the fact that the lines are rarely straight, as though each fabric piece is a lively entity, not completely subsumed by right angle and grid. In a finished patchework, curving lines can easily produce puckers. Rather than aiming for the Amish's quality of linear precision, these Gee’s Bend ladies use their skills to produce flat finished patchwork comprised of lots of curves and not-straight lines.

"The greatest straightness looks like crookedness." Lao Tzu