When I first started to make quilts, all my efforts were accompanied by questions: to speak or not to spaek? to be silent or to talk back? to explain or let it pass? to interrupt or let it be?
In earlier times, in Bulgaria, women kept a little stone inside their mouths to keep them from talking back or screaming. It was a woman's Stone of Wisdom.
Silence is my best friend and my shadow, I work from silence and I speak out of silence.
To interface with silence is stilll the most sustaining, assuring, and calming reality of quilt work.
I begin with silence to articulate the acts which quilt making covers and the actions it contains.
My experience has taught me that silence, the production of cloth, and the work of touch are basic forces.
Using silence as the over arching metaphor of my discussion of quilts, I intend to dynamize our view of the emotional surround, the emotional energy and the practical efforts that go into quiltmaking.
If taken seirously as women's art, quilts cannot be perceived and enjoyed as isolated aesthetic objects divorced from the relationships of women to each other and to the rest of human kind.
I work out of silence, because silence makes up for my lack of working space.
Working on a quilt I am wrapped in silence, wrappped in thought.
Anyone contemplating quilts and quiltmaking also has to enter this space of being wrapped so as to emerge transformed.
All text by
Radka Donnell 1990, an art quilt pioneer
All images of a new work in progress, the middle and back are rescued blankets, the top pieced from plant dyed flannel, quilted with red thread grid.
