A personal tragedy has struck. I have just found out that I am in fact from a lineage of quilters and my grandmother had two of her grandmother’s quilts until 2018. She thought no one wanted them so she let them go away in the auction. These quilts, a 9-block and double wedding ring, used to be on the beds of my mother and aunt when they were young. I was away at college and not yet a quilter so I missed this process of purge which seems to have been mostly letting go of heirlooms from the recent past.
I had little to sort thru from my grandparents Joanne and Aubrey that had belonged to more distant ancestors. Having moved across the country twice in the 80’s (to California and back), they held onto only a mindset that what they had could be easily replaced by a department store. Any textile history from that side of the family has been lost to antique stores or thrift bins.
Accumulation
Quilts are bulky to store like many art forms. It may be difficult to dedicate an entire closet in a small living space to linens and a couch back can only hold so many blankets. Still, how can we parse what is worth saving? In Maine, I am staying with a family member who saves most things from the landfill because they can still be used. He is certainly regarded as an oddball because it is uncouth to accumulate material. It is so much better to throw things into a void of forgetting. The garbage collection system is a game of object impermanence. I was talking to a maker in Alaska recently who is responsible for her own trash haul. The local governments have set up areas to leave and take things as you need them. She’s found a lot of old fabric and even two sewing machines there.
This feels responsible: to have things and use them or to give them to those who can. Still every time I return to the house where I grew up, there is a battle of accumulation. My father buys things for hobbies he doesn’t yet do and my mother responds by whittling her collections smaller and smaller, leaving space until it is filled again. I was recently saddened that she got rid of all of her teaching outfits—some blouses she’s had for 20 years—immediately upon her retirement. The tidying up, sparking joy minimalist trend is a response to the post-industrial world we live in where everyone has more shit than they know what to do with. Everything is cheap and replaced without a second thought. There is also a constant tension between accumulating stuff and being rid of it. Making space to fill with more shit.
The argument of small living was presented to me in college as a class issue. To be able to live in a tiny home or with a minimalist lifestyle, there is an implied comfort that in the event you need something you can go and buy it. There is a huge cultural difference in the perception of a tiny house versus a mobile home for example. Too, I think of fabric stashes and the cultural perception of clutter as inferior. Many elders who have saved material have contributed to nice fabrics and garments we still can access. So often there is a feeling of shame around stashes, it is not viewed as valuable even though it carries a usable material wealth. Fabric is not deemed valuable when nearly the entire history of textiles is viewed and devalued as women’s work.
I have many materials because I am poor and frugal. I gather what I can and find a use for it, a practice which has been made apparent thru the process of moving. It’s hard to stay mobile and sentimental, peering into the quiet lives of materials and know there too lies a story.
My particular brand of socialism (communal humanism, whatever term you’d like) is all about spreading the materials I collect too. Most of my books are a rotating cast as they should be, and collage materials are easily mailed away. Collection without sharing is individualist hoarding. I am most jazzed by collaborations that I can provide the material for and to use the materials I have brings me joy.
Emptiness
What is the alternative to accumulating bulk? How did my grandmother’s house look once downsized? A condo with white everything, white covered particle board furniture that would fall apart if you looked at it too hard, and a great nothingness upon the walls. I’m talking artwork that is so unoffensive it has ceased to be, a No-Thing. This one painting likely bought at a big box store is just a printed abstract canvas with blue smudges, in the style of going to a museum and saying “I could do that” but probably made by an AI. I think about my great grandfather who did say “I could do that” and did it.
Timmin’s Interiors was a family furniture store that started in the 80’s (I think…) and my great grandfather was so turned off by the price of abstract paintings for the show rooms that he took up painting himself. My sister still has one of his last works, a brightly colored bucolic farm scene. That painting brings me so much joy when I get to see it. There is a stark contrast between this family painting and the canvas in my grandmother’s house.
I am not sure why there is such a desire to rid the home of sentimentality. Anyone in the country could have that blue smudgy canvas but there is only one hand painted scene by Thomas Timmins. When we surround ourselves in homes with cheap shit that is devoid of meaning, we are closing off to an entirely different sensorial and emotional experience above the mundane. The connection to the hand and history make for a rich world to inhabit. I’ll be recreating that lost double wedding ring quilt at least in print form at my residency this week. And when I arrive home from New England, you’ll find me curled up in a chair that is has been in the family for 40 years under one of my mom’s paintings.
Until then, be well