Every time we visited my Grandma Joyce throughout my childhood, she was quilting. I could always find her working on a new project, whether it was embroidering flowers by hand to add to a hanging wall quilt or picking out fabric together for her to make into my very own quilt. After I made a baby quilt as my final project in sewing class as a teenager, she printed out the picture, and it hung in her quilting room forever after. When my grandma died at the age of 99 in the November of 2022, she left my family with a large collection of quilts, some collected with my grandfather, but many of which she made herself in over fifty years of work. While it would be impractical to walk around perpetually wrapped in a quilt or two—and unthinkable to cut apart her work—I could create a more wearable version with the fabric she left behind and passed to me. By amalgamating the patterns and motifs of her quilts into a coat, I was able to create something she would be proud to see and to carry pieces of my grandma’s heritage with me through daily life.
As an artist, a statistician, and a PhD student in data visualization, the combination of textile arts and data representations into “data physicalizations” is one of the focuses of my research and practice. In my work, I look for ways to combine my scientific skills with artistic expression to make data come alive so that it can be felt, emotionally and literally. By making the intangible tangible through handcraft, I want to make data more real to others by going beyond the screen. For Quilted Memory, many forms of data coalesce into many manifestations of warmth and care.
All the fabric used in the coat was originally hers, and some was leftover scraps from her own finished quilts. Each pattern found in the coat is a recreation in a similar color palette to a quilt pattern and colorway she used. Because many of her quilts use similar shapes and ideas, certain sections of the coat are direct pattern matches, while others are blends of colorways and patterns she used—together, they form a patchwork object made cohesive. The project is born out of a conception of quilt motifs as a form of data, presenting a synthesized view of her decades of work brought together in one garment. This coat blends these different patterns into a complete object that serves as a visualization of her work and a representation of the warmth she provided my family and the memories of her I hold dear.
In a further layering of these feelings of warmth, care, and heritage, the embroidery across the front panels and pocket of the coat is an abstracted family tree: these flowers symbolize her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. The petals and the seeds represent birthdays—as months and days respectively—while colors map to generations. I used her leftover thread to embroider the flowers for her and my grandfather, the same as was used in her embroidered hanging quilt. All of the thread itself is additionally dyed with thermochromic pigment, and so it transforms into a brighter color when the thread is warmed. As the coat is buttoned and worn, heating pads nestled inside are turned on progressively. In doing so, the thread brightens, bringing a focus to the family tree through a cascade of color traveling up the coat. Through literal warmth, the familial warmth of is emphasized.
As a complete work, this piece is as much an abstract representation of multiple forms of data as it is a tangible manifestation of love, grief, and the transformation of these emotions into one another. My grandma put so much love and care into her quilts and her family, love that I carry with me every day. This coat blends her affection together into an overwhelming warmth, made physical and showing through to anyone who sees it.
Quilted Memory has been exhibited at the Annmarie Sculpture Garden and Arts Center in Solomons, MD, USA
