Touched with All the Radiance that a Sudden Sun Discloses

• Main Author: Fornaro, Marie
• Format: Others
• Published: VCU Scholars Compass 2019
• Subjects: Fine Arts
• Online Access: https://scholarscompass.vcu.edu/etd/5929; https://scholarscompass.vcu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=7022&context=etd

The thread running through my work is a constant impulse to rend and repair; to make, unmake, and remake. This repetitive and circular approach allows me to confront the cyclical nature of gendered oppression. What does it mean to make something beautiful and then to dismantle it? How do we reckon with the pieces that remain? By deconstructing the beautiful and lovingly crafted objects that I spend hours making, I recenter “craft” as a verb rather than a noun, forcing myself and my audience to resist the comforting illusion of certainty. I contextualize my piecework and quilting in a long line of American women who have wielded needle and thread to speak truth to power. Informed by intersectional feminist studies and grounded in the historical tragedy of the witch hunts of the Middle Ages, my research plumbs the confluence of quiltmaking and language, both encoded and overt. I believe that textile crafts, as the media least reified by the fine art establishment, hold a potent ability to confront the capitalist, sexist, and colonialist assumptions propping up the false dichotomy between mind and body, between art and craft, between those who are permitted to speak and those who are silenced.