Sunday at the Turner Contemporary Margate

We Will Walk – Art and Resistance in the American South

I’m really interested in the preservation of ancient techniques and craftsmanship. After visiting the Turner Contemporary galleries exhibition “We Will Walk – Art and Resistance in the American South” I’ve been thinking a lot more about materiality, as part of the exhibition they had quilts that had been made by the Gees Bend Quilting Collective, a collective of black craftswomen from Gees Bend. Gees Bend is an isolated area on the Alabama River and most of the people who live there are descendants of the Black people who had been enslaved and continued to live and work there after emancipation. There’s a strong tradition of quilting in this area that’s been passed down through generations, from times of slavery when women would save old scraps of clothe and worn out clothes to create quilts, to the 1960s when the collective was formed in order to sell these quilts to help fund the Civil Rights Movement. The materiality of these objects speak not only to sustainability but to the spirit that they encapsulate, there was a quote in the exhibition by Joe Minter that really resonated with me, ‘That what is invisible, is thrown away, could be made into something so it demonstrates that even what gets thrown away with spirit in it, can survive and grow. A spirit of all the people who have touched and felt that material has stayed in the material.” So, it’s not just the spirit of the makers but the spirit of the material and the spirit of the people who have passed on this tradition.