Threadbare Bound in Beauty: To Mend or Amend

As a graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago with focuses in art history, ceramics, and social justice art education, and a professional background in tactile visual art for the blind and visually impaired, H. Eliz uses art as her vehicle of engagement. She is working to harness simple gestural strokes to trigger shared understandings, memories, and feelings. “I use my art to teach appreciation in alternative means – experiencing and expressing life through the investigative, curious, and imaginative power of play. My art is more than object, it is an invitation.” Find out more by visiting www.heliziv.com.

Why Didn’t You Tell Me? by Carmen Rita Wong

Themes within the book parallel my own knowing firsthand the impact of a mothers silence that can leave a family threadbare. Yet including an understanding of the beauty that can prevail as love is still present in relationships that can be strained and lead to separation, confusion, and isolation.

So too is my relationship with material informed and is inseparable from my upbring and the tangled relationship with my own mother.  Early memories sitting under a large stretched communal quilt as a guild of women talk and laugh above me, needles rhythmically stitching in unison binding us in that moment together.  Fabric, just as life, is a material woven deeply into the tapestry of community.  My mother’s connection to textiles was an outlet of self expression and creativity. I grew up in awe of the circle of independent strong women, who were breaking traditional rules of quilting and innovating in the emerging field of fiber arts with new techniques. Their eyes filled with the fiery spark of inspiration! In my eyes, the same material, so beautiful, intricate, and resilient, began to wear, stretched thin, fraying, but unable to break.  What happens when a mother is unable to unravel? In grief, a silence seemed to flood every crevice of my memory and so too did the material of early youth become a suffocating presence.  

Mothers give structure and can disintegrate it simultaneously. Creating fractures. Now as a mother myself, do I work to mend something broken or do I amend and add to it in its retelling?  Through my art, I can recontextualize what I have learned, unlearned, discarded, and held.  As if the telling of my own story cut memory from the material of my own life. Like a patchwork of fragmented moments holding  precious every scrap seeing added beauty and power through context. 

In creating four small wall mounted ceramic works, I mimic the quilted tradition of the “crazy quilt” first emerging in the 1800’s and characterized by their patchwork asymmetrical appearance. Unlike their name, they are not random but are highly planned and ornately detailed motifs, rich in a variety of martial arts, and as unique as their creators. Crazing quilting represents the traditions of mother and daughter,  preserving, embellishing, storytelling, and mended. Clay is a medium receptive to impressions and can be molded.  Clay also holds memory as a material that can be wedged and reworked. It also can become brittle, fragile and break. It can be dissolved, reconstituted, amended, strengthened and bonded through fire.  It is in the juxtaposition of the soft material of my youth and the hardened resilient material of my adulthood that is formed through the impression and the adaptive malleability of seeing beauty in the threadbare.

Artist interview: Start at timestamp 33:21