Medium: Linen jacquard fabric from Tostmann Trachten, Vienna; Linen / cotton blend fabric; Thread; Vintage clothespins
Dimensions: 75 inches x 60 inches
Price: NFS
Description: Inspired by the San Francisco quilt pattern series developed by Sarah Jean Makes (https://www.sarahjeanmakes.com/shop/printed-patterns) and fueled by an ongoing desire to animate connections with my matrilineal Austrian heritage, the Vienna Opera House Quilt project is an ongoing exploration of textiles, family lore, and place-based design. Based on architectural features of the opera house in San Francisco, where I sang as a child and where my mother and I enjoy music together, the San Francisco Opera House Quilt is an early product of this exploration. It combines textiles sourced from one of my mother's early workplaces, the Tostmann Trachten shop in her home town, Vienna, with fabrics I have used in my former California residences - houses shared with friends in Oakland in the early 2000s, as well as salvaged curtains from my childhood Berkeley bedroom. It is the first full-size quilt I have endeavored to make, and serves as a learning medium for future manifestations of the Vienna Opera House Quilt project. I have made many technical "mistakes," each one a reminder of the messiness of mothering, and an invitation to practice acceptance, creativity, and forgiveness. Through the process of translating familial lore into geometric patterns on paper, then in textiles, I aim to anchor complex, sometimes uncomfortable, relational, chronological, and spatial narratives in the reassuring repetition of the grid, and the comforting softness and warmth of a quilt.
San Francisco Opera House Quilt | 120710 -
