“Ah que dia! It was a crisp and cold morning when this little bambino joined all the other Italians upon this earth. Heaven held its ears when I sounded my first cry. The whole hospital knew I had come. How could they help with all the noise?” - Grandma Pink
I look at photos of my grandmother and I cry. My likeness stares back at me and I think of all the space between us–what we were given and what was withheld. The summer before I began my BFA Senior Thesis, my father emailed me a PDF, 13 type-written pages which he had scanned a few days prior. It was an autobiography my grandmother had written for herself when she was 22, and once again I caught my breath catching in my throat as I poured over her unfamiliar voice.
I meet her as she was at my age, and take in her excitement for the world, her pride in her accomplishments. I linger on descriptions of her friends and cats, the pale green dress with a stark white collar she wears, how she rides her horse around the ranch and sleeps beside the cows. The moments that transform her from myth to person, and I relish in this process.
When visiting my parents, my father would emerge from the garage carrying large clear plastic bins filled with her artwork, and when we remove the lids our kitchen is filled with the musk of decomposition. I reach in and pull out rough masses of hand-dyed wool yarn, sand and dirt falling from each work and peppering my parents tiled floors. The cat plays with the rusted bells which dangle from long stretches of imperfectly spun yarn. Each piece reeks like a living being, because she worked with the by-products of life. Sheeps wool. Petrified dog shit. Vegetable dyed silks. Time has bottled these smells, but has only succeeded in making them stronger.
In comparison my artwork feels sterile. I work largely from a computer. Each of her works began from something that grows or bleeds, and each of mine begins with a square of 100,000 white pixels. Sometimes I paint, but when I do it is with neon pigments suspended in a polymer binder, so reflective that they will glow in the dark. I don’t dislike the synthetic quality of my work, the way it vibrates the eye and calls upon visions of the mass-produced. But I knew that meeting my grandmother’s practice in a way that wouldn’t nullify my own would be a difficult task.
Both fiber arts and graphic design are placed in a denigrated position as a result of their functionality. They emerged out of necessity, rather than the detached headspace where fine art is ‘supposed’ to coagulate—self motivated and self involved. Through this ideology, fiber arts are implicitly gendered, and encased in the deprecated confines of ‘women's work’. Graphic arts are considered too commercial. But we both pursued our practices because their function allowed us to justify our investment in artwork, our dedication to an impractical passtime.
By discovering this thematic connection, I was able to more comfortably approach the formal construction of my work, abandoning my naive desire to somehow combine all the elements of both of our practices together. Instead, I refined the tools I wished to work with. Beginning with archival photographs, I pulled images documenting her artwork and life through various digital platforms, manipulating them until I felt that they accessed the melodramatic gaudiness I have found to be a staple of my artistic voice. Through this process, her work became my work. Then, I digitally printed these altered images onto cotton, canvas and silk, later going in and further refining these images with ink, paint, and pencils. Once these digital imaginings had been re-materialized, I patched them together to create a quilt, embellishing it with buttons, keys, broaches and pearls she had collected over the course of her lifetime. The piece then becomes hers once again.
