Long ago when I lived in Indianapolis, there was a nice encyclopedic art museum with an interesting collection of 20th-century art that I enjoyed visiting several times a year. That collection has since been removed and replaced with a “light and sound experience” as museum leadership transformed the joint into a family-fun center, but the impact of a particular mixed-media, found-object installation that I first saw in 1997 has stayed with me all those years. “Seven Spades” by Donald Lipski was dozens of small-scale abstract sculptures made of bits of jetsam people who inherit an old barn haul to the county dump. Individually, they didn’t seem like anything to look at, but displaying so many together gave them weight and made them interesting.
In the winter of 2017, I started sewing small alien heads using the “Lucky Sampler” method I learned from Susan Shie in 2004 (still my favorite method, I should do more). Each one had unique background fabric. As my collection grew large enough for a shoebox, I remembered this piece from Indy–which I had titled “100 things from the barn” in my head–and decided 100 was a good amount for a collection. But “one hundred” is too round, so I set out to make 121 small aliens. After an involuntary pause in 2020, I finally finished in the summer of 2021.
The units aged for awhile as I focused on other things. Last month, I finally made up a substrate), quilted a grid on it, faced it so the edges would be flat, and spent a rather painful several afternoons attaching each small piece with beads and sequins.
The facing turned out not completely square, but none of the individual units are square, so pretend “not squared” was a deliberate design choice.
I have titled this one “121 Extraterrestrial Biological Entities” so the viewer can derive and assign their own interpretation of the collection of individual aliens shown here. I had a semi-thoughtful and provocative title for it in 2019, but 1) the world has changed and I no longer believe that title; and 2) We saw an art quilt exhibition last month where the artist statements on pleasant block-based quilts were Serious and Pompous Political Opinions, and that turned otherwise lovely pieces ridiculous.
The great thing about the white fabric is you can see all of the cat fur that got incorporated into the individual units while I sat on the couch stitching them. There is even some white fur from Smokey, who went OTRB in 2019. I’m leaving it all there. I’m going to start describing every art piece I finish as “deeply autobiographical, and those dudes are a big part of me.
I have been working with this motif since 2008, and I’m not sure I’m done with it yet. Watch this space.
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