Ground Zero 1994
wool, pieced and quilted, 224 x 206cm (88 x 81”)

Sarah’s Night Vision 1999
wool, pieced and quilted, 108 x 107cm (43 x 42”)

The Speed of Darkness 1997
wool, pieced and quilted, 246 X 230cm (97 x 90”)

Home 1997
wool, pieced and quilted, 233 x 226cm (94” x 89”)

Inside Night 1999
wool, pieced and quilted, 152 x 152cm (60 x 60”)

To the Lighthouse 1998
wool, pieced and quilted, 19^th century knitted and quilted blankets, cut vinyl wall text

In the fall of 1997, I was invited by the Textile Museum of Canada, to work with their collection, in preparation for an exhibition there the following year. My time in the storage vaults reminded me of a passage from A Midwife’s Tale by the historian Laurel Thatcher Ullrich, where she writes of her desire to reveal the lives of the women who "remake the world every day.” She continues. “It's not an imaginative connection though imagination is part of it. My connection to the past or any historian's is through the stuff. It's about sources, it's about clues, about the leavings, the shards, the remnants of people who once lived and who don't live any more.” At the Textile Museum, deep in their storage vaults, I was doing what Ullrich does, but using my own method.

I selected three 19th century quilts and one knitted blanket from the museum's collection, all relatively simple, utilitarian, warm covers. I then made a quilt, conforming as much as possible to the colours and materials of the old covers. I then folded my quilt into a stack of the museum covers. By inserting one of my quilts into the pile, I felt buried, embraced, and held close by the history of use contained in those objects.

The stack of quilts and blankets was accompanied by the following passage from Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse:

... for it was not knowledge but unity that she desired, not inscriptions on tablets, nothing that could be written in any language ...., but intimacy itself, which is knowledge, she had thought, leaning her head on Mrs. Ramsay's knee.

To the Lighthouse (Detail) 1998
wool, pieced and quilted, 19th century knitted and quilted blankets, cut vinyl wall text