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| Four Play. |
Hurricane Sandy, the worst storm of the 2012 hurricane season, left many shore-line New Jersey and New York houses in ruins; piles of debris were everywhere. The home of artist and quilt-lover Laura Petrovich-Cheney was damaged and her family's summer home was destroyed.
Ms. Petrovich-Cheney found a way of processing the loss of so many homes. She repurposed storm debris - bits and pieces whose small size belied the weight of memories embedded within them - into a series of "wooden quilts". Five of her sculptures are on display in the exhibit
What Remains: Wooden Quilt Sculptures of Laura Petrovich-Cheney at the
Fuller Craft Museum from Oct. 22, 2016 - Nov. 12, 2017.
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| In the Thick of It. |
Ms. Petrovich-Cheney's work is also featured in the June/July 2017 issue (#87) of
Quilting Arts magazine. In the article, which has additional images from the series and of work in progress, she writes:
Each piece of wood collected carried with it the promise of reinvention. The salvaged wood became the major source for the wooden quilt series. I often had the opportunity to talk to the homeowners who told me about their home's history and also shared their memories and sorrows of losing everything.
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| Big Deal. |
I believe that material has memory. Sometimes, I just picked through the piles of trash and I wondered about the wood's former life as a little girl's dresser - or a kitchen cabinet that held cherished china. The intimate textures of this wood, with its chipped layers of paint, nail holes, and grain, tell a story and suggest a prior life in the faded colors and worn surfaces. The wood was weathered, exposed, and open to new possibilities.
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| Constructions. |
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| Five "wooden quilts" on display. |
Ms. Petrovich-Cheney has master's degrees in both fashion design and fine arts and grew up in a community of women who stitched and quilted. She describes her research:
Quilt patterns were an important inspiration for this work. I found inspiration in the American ideal of pioneer women's can-do, resilient spirit and instinct for survival. I learned that these women crafted quilts for warmth and comfort with scraps of cloth-scraps into which they breathed new life and new purpose. I studied quilt patterns from early pioneer days, the Civil War, Gee's Bend, Amish, southern quilts. In particular, I was drawn to women quilters whose lives were largely ignored by history, even while their handiwork transcended race, religion and culture. Most importantly, the idea of comfort from a quilt inspired me.
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| Off of Center. |
