Sew Me a Quilt. Tell You a Story.

Abstract

Sew Me a Quilt. Tell  You a Story. was a performative conversation between Sequoia Barnes and Carol Tulloch that took place at the Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh (25 April 2019). It was in response to the exhibition Senga Nengudi (16 March–26 May 2019), notably her work Ceremony for Freeway Frets (1979) and the RSVP series. These feature costume and textiles associated with Black bodies which Barnes argues lean on the concept of fashioning – establishing design, making and aesthetic codes engineered by and superimposed onto marginalized people – a theme that Barnes explores in her research practice. For Tulloch these works reflect styling – the construction of self through the assemblage of garments, accessories, hairstyles and beauty regimes that may, or may not, be ‘in fashion’ at the time of use. To style one’s body is part of everyday life, which is agency and a form of self-telling. ‘Fashioning’ and ‘styling’ are different, yet equally valid, approaches to thinking about making the self. In this article we will discuss how exploration of the concepts Black fashioning and Black styling informed the performance Sew Me a Quilt. Tell You a Story. through two women hand-stitching a quilt, a joint act that is a longstanding signifier of Black women’s making traditions, storytelling and communal experience. As two Black women who are culturally and generationally different – Barnes is African American and Tulloch is Black British – our shared diasporic connections to quilt-making engendered our pursuit of authorship and agency through making in the otherwise privileged space of the ‘white cube gallery’. Additionally, the article will discuss how this performative conversation blurred the lines between making and performance, materiality and lived experiences as well as how our performative exchange of knowledge – academic, cultural and political – created something that went beyond the usual experience of visiting a gallery to ‘look at art’ to seeing and listening. The original idea for the performance, instigated by Barnes, was for her and Tulloch to talk while hand-stitching an unfinished quilt, which Tulloch began in 2010, in front of an audience they were not to engage with. The intention was to hold space for the audience to enable listening. In practice, the performative conversation also held space for: different kinds of conversations and listening; emotional experiences and healing; and consideration of how Tulloch and Barnes fashion/style their own identities through memories as they stitched towards completing a quilt as a form of remembrance.