Forwarding (I–XI)

I harbor an ongoing fascination with a set of 306 abstract shapes drawn, cut, and sewn into a Crazy Quilt sometime between 1885 and 1895 by New Jersey quilt-maker Rachel Blair Greene. In Correspondence from the Piecework project I re-created or “re-performed” my own version of her quilt but was unsatisfied with the result. A couple of years later I set out to create a new project which would isolate these shapes and make it possible to see them clearly and in relationship to one another. I am fundamentally interested in the shapes themselves: both individually and in the way one connects with another. They have such surprising character that I imagine them to have been created democratically, each considered to be of equal value.

I didn’t realize when I started that I would produce an ongoing series of projects, now grouped under the shared title Forwarding, that revisit these shapes in a variety of ways. The first of these is Forwarding: I-XI and it’s made from USPS Express and Priority Tyvek mailers and two types of ordinary paper printed with several pinstripe security patterns. These specific patterns come from security envelopes used for communications between corporations and customers (common enough in the days before online payments became the norm). Both sides of each paper or Tyvek material are used in various ways to create a panel-in-lattice structure that holds all the shapes taken from Greene's crazy quilt.