2012-2015

This art piece began when I asked my mother for the empty spools of thread that she, her mother, my grandmother and various other women in our extended family had used and collected throughout the years. They arrived via mail from North Carolina in a piece of beaten-up Samsonite luggage, and the moment I opened it I asked myself: Why did I ask for these? They were just empty spools, some with old string still on them, made variously of wood, plastic, metal and styrofoam. Over the years, I had seen these spools of thread around my home and somehow they spoke to me about a life lived, but initially I was unable to tie it all together.

As I began to turn the spools over in my hands and in my mind, I began to understand that they symbolized how in my family females extended themselves for others, literally stitching things together for everyone.  The women I had grown up with stitched up holes in shirts, repaired quilts to keep us warm and made entirely new garments for us to wear.  Each individual act was done with consistent care, on a daily basis, a mundane but essential activity.

I began to play with the spools, coloring them and stringing them together using a larger piece of twine that I slipped through the whole in the center.  As I did this, each spool began to feel like a bead on a mala.  Buddhists use these malas to help them say mantras and thereby go deeper into the meaning of life; I was using these spools to do the same thing in my life.

My intention became to do a hanging sculpture of 365 spools, one for each day of the year to symbolize the steady, consistent care given to this nature of work.  As it turned out, my family’s collection ran short of 365 spools, so I asked my mother to gather more — from her neighbors and her friends in the small town where I had grown up.  That’s when the full meaning of the piece became clear to me:  It’s not just my family where this work has been done, but in families around the world, for as far back as humans have been human. The spools are meant to honor the everyday strength of how one by one, person by person and family to family and community to community, a world is stitched together.  

  H. 48’, W. & D. varies 1.5” to 1”