I am drawn to that which is broken and stitched. A life in a community of recovery has led me to see the force and beauty of the wounded who have survived. The stitched line like a scar. Striving to make music, in cloth or words, out of that which is broken.
A love of the jazz of improvisation, the building of layers of meaning through shapes and sound and color. Abstraction a kind of breaking and reassembling that is a more seductive entrance into a question or feeling.
To embrace the surprise of hand-dyed fabrics, of organic lines.
To honor the essential and primitive.
Texture, whether in threads or cloths or words.
To respect the intelligence of the material, whether the cloth or the page. To not impose my ego on the material but to work in concert with it. To allow something more mysterious and powerful to come out of cloth or paper through these practices than would if I dictated everything, as in traditional quilting or traditional poetic forms.
To acknowledge the richness and beauty of darkness when set against the lines and colors of hope. To take everything I know about writing poetry and use it in cloth.
To break, and then to mend in a new way that doesn’t hide the brokenness.
Sheryl St. Germain
March 2022