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Twyla Tharp, #6 — Harness your memory
Quite some while ago, I included some quotes from Twyla Tharp; I’d like to do that again, and include some other writers on creativity from time to time. Tharp writes:
“Metaphor is our vocabulary for connecting what we’re experiencing now with what we have experienced before. It’s not only how we express what we remember, it’s how we interpret it, for ourselves and others.”
And then she talks about different kinds of memory:
Muscle memory (for an athlete or a dancer, for example, remembering the shape of a movement–for a quilter, the movement of your arms and hands as you quilt)
Sensory memory (how a smell, for example, triggers a memory of Gramma’s kitchen)
Institutional memory
Ancient memory…things that seem ingrained in our psyches.
So which of these memories are in your quilts? It is the expression and interpretation of memory that make a quilt (or any other medium) art. I don’t know about it being art, but I love my memory-quilt of my Gramma’s kitchen, Flying Toast. It transports me back four decades to a place and time that only four of us still living actually remember: me, cousin Anne, Mom and Aunt Donna–everyone else is gone.
In the detail below, I can see, smell, feel the warmth of the sunlight pouring into the breakfast nook, remember the series of “state” plates on the top plate rail that ran around the room above the windows, and the portion of her collection on the walls. I inherited the toaster table, so scanned it and printed onto fabric to make the table, chairs and toaster table, and think of finding the “ugly linoleum” fabric in central Africa (where I lived at the time) which gave me the original idea to make this quilt (some ten plus years before it actually got made!). The walls are plaster, and outside the archway into the breakfast nook is the ceramic clock Aunt Katie made. She spent most of her 84 years in Wyoming, living in the back of the beyond, but she was an artist at heart, in addition to mom, devoted wife to a ranch hand, cook to all the cowboys who rode in as a ravenous horde at lunchtime, yet living outside the thriving metropolis of Meeteetsee (population about 600) she had her kiln and art supplies and found time and spirit for creativity.
May 17th, 2007 at 2:01 am
That reminds me at the book of Marcel Proust.
A la recherché de la tempe perdue
I like your quilt and your description.
Heidi
May 19th, 2007 at 9:14 am
SB:
When did you do this one?!