Piecing Together the Garden: The Making of My Paper Quilts

I began making my first paper quilt as a prototype.

I wanted a way to explore another route of painting using the visual language of quilt patterns. I had been thinking about quilts and the way they are constructed from individual pieces. How a larger image can slowly come together from fragments that have been cut, rearranged, and stitched together. I kept thinking about the way I make quilts with fabric. I try to use every little scrap I can from old sheets, shirts, and whatever else I have around. I measure and cut and manipulate the fabric so that I have just enough of what I need. Then I spend a long time arranging and rearranging the pieces, turning them around, moving them from one place to another, and changing my mind.

There is a surprising amount of uncertainty in that process, especially as a new quilter. You can have a plan, but you don't really know what the finished thing will look like until the pieces begin to come together.

As I worked on the quilt, I started wondering what it would be like to bring that same process into my paintings. What if I didn't just paint one layer over another? What if I actually cut the image apart and pieced it back together? So I tried it with watercolor on paper.

I painted two similar images. Then I cut one of them apart, following the quilt pattern I had been working on with fabric, and began placing sections of that painting over the other. This was much more tedious than I expected. There was a lot of measuring. A lot of math. A lot of cutting hundreds of little squares and triangles by hand. A lot of holding pieces up to one another and hoping they would line up. And some of the pieces never made it into the final painting at all. Other parts of the painting underneath disappeared completely beneath pieces from the second one. Once I started cutting, I couldn't really go back. I had to work with whatever pieces I had and figure out where they might belong.

It became a bit of a “trust the process and see what happens” kind of experience, a practice in surrender. I couldn't know if everything would fit together the way I imagined. I couldn't see the whole image while I was making it. I just had to make one decision, then another, and another, and trust that eventually I would be able to step back and see something whole.

The longer I worked this way, the more familiar the process began to feel. I started thinking about how often life feels like this. We make plans. We try to arrange things in a way that makes sense. We change our minds. We pivot. We hold pieces up beside one another and wonder if they belong together. Sometimes something we thought would be important doesn't make it into the final picture at all. Sometimes something gets covered up before we ever get to see what it might have become. Sometimes we just have to keep going without knowing how everything is going to fit together.

The figures that appear within these quilted forests are versions of myself. Sometimes there is one. Sometimes there are two. I spend a lot of time inside my own head. There are moments when it feels as though there are multiple versions of myself moving through the same experience. The one living it, and the one watching, questioning, remembering, anticipating, or trying to make sense of it all. In these paintings, the two figures aren't necessarily two separate people. They can be two moments, two responses, two versions of the same person existing within the same landscape. They keep each other company.

There is something comforting about that, but also lonely. The figures often seem to be waiting. They aren't necessarily going anywhere. They simply exist together within the garden, a landscape that can feel tangled, dark, and difficult to navigate, but also sometimes comfortable and full of wonder.

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