Correspondences

A hand-quilted wall hanging made over the course of a year through a process of shared prompts. Fabrics are all found or supplied by the subject: an IKEA tablecloth, her own textiles, cotton batting. Each prompt released by the project Destroy This Quilt was interpreted through something she gave back: a word, a memory, a photograph. The piece holds her life across continents: Zanzibar, South Africa, an EDS campaign, a cheeky cigarette.

Correspondences is a commission: a wall hanging made for a home in a South African wildlife park, for a friend I met in Riyadh. I made it over the course of a year using a framework of prompts released every two weeks by the project Destroy This Quilt, created by Zak Foster. Each prompt I discussed with her, and she responded: sometimes with a single word, sometimes with a described memory, sometimes with a photograph. What she gave back became the material of the work.

All the materials came from her: her own fabrics, an IKEA tablecloth, cotton batting. The palette follows the colours of the bush and the clothing she had worn. I sourced nothing independently of the relationship between us.

The prompts gathered a life across geography. Palm tree fronds folding in the breeze at her family hotel in Zanzibar. Zebra-print fabric worn in support of an EDS campaign. Gold-gilded burn marks for cheeky cigarettes. Memory was the structure; the quilt held it.

This belongs to a strand of my practice that uses external prompts to relinquish control: opening the decisions to another person's archive. Here, that person was also the subject, the client, and the eventual keeper of the piece.