‘Their quilts did not mimic the traditional patchwork of white American women, which were stitched in orderly arrangements. Slave quilts were improvised like music: syncopated, free-spirited, with asymmetrical staggerings of texture and shade to create an abstract whole.’

(Hunter 2019, 200).

USE Image: Lucy T. Pettway (b.1921), ‘Snowball’ (drunkard’s path quilt variation) c.1950
 

When we speak of patchwork, we speak of bits and pieces, things from different times and places stitched together into a pattern. It is a process of recuperation and arrangement, a process of transformation, a way of working with materials and with the hands. It is often collaborative. It materialises politics. As Clare Hunter’s quotation above shows, it can be a way of piecing together community and resisting racist and/or patriarchal effacement. Patchwork signifies and encodes – it is textual. It is textural: quilts or clothing that form protective or comforting wrappings or habits. It is habitual and inhabited. It is gestural and embodied. It takes time, and evolves over time, passed down and transmitted, re-worked: a palimpsest. Patchwork is thrifty and resourceful. It makes creative re-use of materials, makes new out of old, preserves memories and histories but in new formulations, balancing resistance and acceptance, renewal and loss. It brings people together, creatively, with minimal resources. Of course, it has (like everything else) also become a commodity, even an industry – but it holds out the possibility of unpicking capitalist relationships with objects and rethinking our understanding of materials and waste.

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Patchwork has close relatives in cinematic or video montage and in all forms of collage. This seminar explores this family of juxtaposition and superimposition of forms, text and images as ways of thinking through making. We will consider and play with the multiple possibilities of patchwork thinking, including the possibility that such thinking is of critical importance in approaching the emergency of our rapidly changing climate.