Unsanctioned Forms of Caring
A community engaged art project to create a hand made 150x225cm Generosity Quilt.
Created in conversation with Dark Matter Labs,
With a focus on collaborative co-creation, the project seeks to generate an experience of vulnerably sharing oneself with another in a safe conversational context and thus make visible an otherwise invisible flow of care.
Methodology
The project proceeds in three phases
Phase 1: Making Quilt Panels (currently ongoing)
Participants are asked to design and create a 15x15cm cloth panel that symbolizes a moment of grief or gratitude in their life which they would like to give expression to.
Phase 2: Making the Quilt
In this phase, the 15x15cm panels are stitched together forming a 75x150cm quilt. If more than 150 have been created, more than one quilt will be made.
Phase 3: Sleeping under the Quilt
This phase will elicit the support of Ming Jing Yu (Koganecho AIR alumna) whose ongoing work “Sleeping Body” documents people sleeping in locations and positions of their choice.
Conceptual Focus
The Generosity Quilt is representative of the paradox of beauty/pain. That is, even in painful moments and amongst difficult circumstances, beauty exists. Equally, life’s most beautiful moments are often bittersweet for their fleeting and ephemeral nature. Life is full of these beauty-pain paradoxes, they are two sides of the same coin, always present and inherent in the human condition. The appropriate and perhaps only response to beauty-pain is gratitude-grief.
The collective human story represented by the quilt, one’s place in that story, and the presence of a tangible created artifact, serves to give participants an embodied sense of agency-in-the-world. Further, the experience of that agency has happened in the context of a community moving-in-action-with-care. The quilt acknowledges the-body-as-a-site-of-knowing, as such facilitates embodied ritual in a world more and more bereft of meaningful, communal ritual. We are given ample opportunity to cognitively or conceptually know we are part of the human family. Unsanctioned Forms of Caring seeks to provide experiential knowing of one’s place within a human family that is still capable of care. It won’t solve all of the world's problems, but it can help us face them empathetically and compassionately.