My sister and I made a quilt for my daughter for her first Christmas. A quilt is a type of blanket made from pieces of fabric sewn together. This quilt is a patchwork of different fabrics which were chosen by my sister. The quilt is called a rag quilt because it is sewn in such a way that all of the edges of the fabric pieces will fray with use and over time. The pattern is squares of fabric with alternating hearts and stars sewn on top. Each square of fabric is printed with a different pattern of images. Each square of fabric was chosen by my sister specifically for this quilt for my daughter. Some of the fabrics were chosen because the images in the pattern refer to Canadian culture: the hockey player, or ice skate images for example. Other fabrics were chosen because they are pieces cut from larger fabrics that my family uses - from clothing or the piece that matches a part of my nephews quilt, for example. The quilt is functional - it keeps my daughter warm and is also used as a play mat in our living room. The quilt was made collaboratively - my sister and I both took part in the process of making it. and this quilt is an archive: the patterns, the fabric, the quilt itself all bring together signs which represent our family, our culture, and our memories.
I see quilting as an example of women producing archives. Quilts are made by sewing pieces of fabric together in a specific pattern. The pattern is the only part of creating a quilt which is static. One may choose the type of fabric, the colour, the size of the pieces. Historically, quilting has served as a gathering place for women, for example the quilting bees where women came together to attach the finished quilt to a filling and backing.( old mist. 78). Quilts were also a useful object: they kept people warm when they sleep. At the same time, quilts were also a gathering together of signs to be related to memory, in a directly physical way: ‘personal, political and social meanings were sewn into these quilts in abstract forms by means of colour and symbolic composition. Quilt-makers evolved an abstract language to signify and communicate their joys and sorrows, their personal and social histories.’(parker and pollock, 77)
Quilts then have a dual purpose - they are functional, they are still part of a daily use, but they are also an object that is made with the intent to be related to memory. The quilt that my sister and I made keeps my daughter warm, shows symbols of her culture and represents to her the closeness, or intimacy of my sister and I because of its collaborative making.
I think that quilting represents a feminist possibility in creating a living archive. I say feminist because they come from a history of production by women and they often represent a collaborative activity which denotes a type of intimacy. They are a living archive because they are at once a useful object, but even in there use they at the same time have the equal purpose to be related to memory.
Earlier I spoke about the difference between the collection and the archive. I stated that the archive is a gathering together of signs with the specific intention for those signs to be related to memory. The collection, I stated, is different from the archive because the main purpose of the collection is to be used, and any memory related to the collection is surplus. With quilting, the function, or usefulness, is just as important as the gathering of signs to be related to memory. It is this blending of use, which suggest the body and all that brings to mind (gender, race, nationality, etc), and representation that makes the quilt a living archive. To take a quilt out of use is to render it solely an archive - solely a representation - no longer a quilt, it is the representation of a quilt ( minus the function) This meeting ground of use and sign is what believe is feminist, living archive, and it is what I focus on in my research work this year.