January 18, 1998
HELEN A. HARRISON
Patchworks: Contemporary Interpretations of the Quilt Form
Islip Art Museum, 50 Irish Lane, East Islip. Through Jan. 25. 224-5402.
Traditional quilts are utilitarian items that often have artistic dimensions, in either the quilting itself — the patterned stitchery that holds them together — or the pieced and appliqued fabric designs called patchwork. Feminists have adopted the patchwork quilt as a kind of talisman, a symbol of creativity long unacknowledged because it was seen as ”women’s work.”
Viewed objectively as a form for structuring imagery and unifying compositional elements, patchwork in particular offers useful models for contemporary artists, abstract and representational alike, regardless of their sex. As it happens, the 22 whose work is featured in this group show are all women, but one can think of just as many male artists who are indebted to patchwork precedents.
Anyone who uses a grid, for example, might be said to be adopting a common quilt format, even when the result is not at all like a traditional bedcovering. Here, the grids most remote from a patchwork source are in Hester Simpson’s untitled panel paintings, with threaded surfaces that seem to hover over richly nuanced tonal veils like nets cast across translucent pools.
Other artists have used unconventional materials like ceramic tile, postage stamps, bricks and even bed springs to allude to the incremental nature of patchwork imagery. In ”Participatory Patchwork,” Donna Henes mimics the album quilt form by asking visitors to contribute sections of the final design, which has no specific end point. The project has the potential to continue until the artist’s ideological goal of peaceful unity is achieved.
Gwenn Thomas reduces patchwork to its lowest common denominator, fabric scraps, which she lays out like specimens and then photographs. The process flattens and homogenizes them into pictorial designs and at the same time forces us to examine the precise nature of what we are seeing — a clever confluence of abstraction and realism.