A Quilt for Your Lungs, 2021

Hand-cut collage

This hand-cut collage was made by creating a quilt pattern that designated the locations of eight colors throughout a geometric lattice drawn onto the paper. The individual magazine clippings were then cut and glued according to their color. The piece is an attempt to create order from the political chaos and information overload of 2020.

The composition of the collage, with the image of the lungs seemingly held on the page by a few fingertips isolated from the kaleidoscopic border by a panel of white paper, gestures towards the odd combination of social isolation and information overload in media that has become a defining quality of the pandemic era. In this way it’s both an ode to the small groups of people holding each other together during this time, and a reflection on the surreal and overwhelming qualities of the past few years. The lungs are both a direct reference to protecting our lungs from the ongoing pandemic, but also protecting our breath more generally as a way to keep ourselves calm and present in deeply unsettling times.

During the time that I worked on this collage, I was inspired by the tradition of American quilt-making, and set out to find a way to integrate that inspiration into my practice. Much of my work is influenced by religious artwork, specifically the quality of altarpieces as sites of reflection and commemoration. I found a lot of similar qualities in the American quilt-making tradition; the often symmetrical and compositionally dense designs, the relationship to specific and important past events, the quality of physical devotion imbued in their creation. These were all qualities that I was already trying to emulate in my collage practice, and I think integrating a more direct reference to quilts came at an inflection point in my practice where I was really trying to push the compositional density and physical engagement with the material to a new level.