This occasion feels momentous. As of last week, the top of the second “Sister” — the red one — is complete. It needs a back, of course, and to be basted, and then it will await stitches just like its blue companion. (Find an old photo of how they started out together here.)
It’s been two years this month since I started cutting the fabrics for these two pieces. While they are obviously two separate quilts, they are one work. They are a diptych, and there is a conversation happening across the space where they stand as separate from one another. They are made of most of the same fabrics, with the same block, and same dimensions. They are radically different from one another.
A few weeks back the artist and writer Anna Fusco [substack here] wrote the line in her newsletter: “And what is love but the transmutation of fear and doubt into faithful gesture?” And this stuck with me, though perhaps not in the exact meaning that she intended.
In a very real way, the story of these quilts began over a decade ago. In the last two years during their actual making, they have been full of fear and doubt. The making of them has been a gesture of faith entirely: first, an act of will and belief towards a different life outcome. A spell attempting to undo something that had been done. Then eventually — now — an act of faith in my own transmutation, a desire to make something new and beautiful out of something else. They are my most intimate quilt projects to date; they are the largest piece of art I have ever made, and the most personal. They are portraits of two people, one of whom is me.
I will write about them extensively at some point, just not today. But I am thrilled to share the finished red top here, now – thrilled to have it arrive at this stage, thrilled at the version of itself it has become.
It is so, so radically different from how I imagined it in its inception two years ago. As am I.