Quilt for Emalia Brown, 25.5" wide x 25" high

Machine quilted and hand stitched with organza overlays and beading

By Gillan Wang:

This quilt was made for Emalia Brown, a high school friend from Maui, where we both grew up, after she was diagnosed with stage IV cancer. The news of Emalia’s illness came as a terrible shock. I created the art quilt to raise money to help defray her escalating medical costs and to work through my own sadness and demonstrate my compassion. She died while the quilt was in process, and It is now being donated in her honor to benefit her preschool aged son, in the Kahalakea Guard Educational Fund. The format of the piece is based on a traditional Hawaiian quilt, but differs in that it tells the story of Emalia’s journey, and our shared connections to Hawaii. 

Traditional Hawaiian quilts typically feature a solid geometric plant-based pattern, appliquéd onto a high-contrast solid fabric.  The geometric pattern that I created is based on the silhouette of my friend from a high school year book photo.  The reference is specific, yet her identity is intentionally ambiguous.  (Emalia’s trademark is a flower behind her ear, which is discernible in the silhouette). I used sheer fabric for the silhouette/geometric shape, atop many colorful fabrics that collectively evoke a sense of water, marine life, flora and fauna – all of which we both love. The sheer fabric allows the imagery below to read through, thereby allowing for multiple readings, and suggesting an elusive state of existence. The words grace, love, peace and eternal are embroidered on and around the geometric form, in English and in Hawaiian.

While I was driven by sorrow to create this quilt, I aimed to express a more upbeat message of love, peace and acceptance.

 The creation of this artwork helped me to come to terms with a very upsetting loss.  Initially I was overwhelmed by my sadness, but eventually this project helped me to reflect on the positive attributes of my friend, which we will forever celebrate.  It also allowed me to feel empowered by taking action to help my friend's family in a tangible way, as opposed to feeling helpless about an unfair situation.

Artist Statement:

 My work is primarily mixed-media, with a recent focus on art quilts. Most of my work is inspired by life’s poignant experiences, such as newborn children, parenting and loss. I am especially interested in establishing a narrative in my work, which invariably informs the aesthetic of a piece. I enjoy creating and considering multiple interpretations, and I take pleasure in exploring concepts and ideas using a variety of materials in unexpected ways. Whimsy, bold color schemes, text and found materials often characterize my work.

I grew up on Maui, Hawaii, which heightened my aesthetic sensibilities and appreciation of color and the natural environment. I have a deep love of diverse materials and for working with my hands. I have a BA from Bard College and a Master’s degree in Architecture from Syracuse University, which expanded my capacity to think spatially, and introduced me to many concepts that I now explore in my artwork, such as layering and transparency.

Art by Gillan

Art quilts, collage & painting

Website: ArtbyGillan.com

Email: ArtbyGillan@gmail.com

I’m a photographer and multidisciplinary artist whose work centers around the idea that sharing stories and making art about potentially isolating experiences can help make those experiences less lonely. I map experiences that many of us share, but don’t always talk about.

I’m currently working on an evolving art project about bereavement called Grief Landscapes, in which I’m documenting the wide variety of ways that people respond to loss. First, I’m inviting people to answer a series of questions about how they grieved after someone’s death. I'm then photographing, in extreme close-up, something that evokes the memory of the person who died, transforming it into an abstract landscape inspired by the person’s grief story.

Grief is often described as a journey, but it’s an intensely individual and often isolating one: rarely do people speak openly about the range of ways of grieving, and there seem to be many misconceptions about the grief process. I’m using the project to examine a number of questions about grief and bereavement: What does it look like? How do people navigate it differently? How does grief change us? Grief Landscapes documents grief not as a prescribed set of steps or timelines but as a place where there are no right answers, just an exploration of new territory.

You can live anywhere in the world to participate in Grief Landscapes, and I’m looking for contributors of all ages and backgrounds, with different relationships to the deceased, and different lengths of time since the loss. To view the project so far and submit your story, go to grieflandscapes.com.

Grief Landscapes is supported by a grant from the Ontario Arts Council.

Mindy Stricke is a multidisciplinary artist creating photographs, interactive installations, conversations and collaborations. Her work has been awarded grants from the Toronto Arts Council, the Ontario Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts, exhibited throughout North America, and has appeared in international publications including The New York Times, Time Magazine, Newsweek, and the Smithsonian Institute Photography Initiative’s book and online exhibit, Click! Photography Changes Everything. Originally from New York, she now lives in Toronto with her husband and two children.

My name is Nancy Marks. I have been a Boston-based printmaker and painter for more than twenty-five years. In addition to solo exhibitions, my work has been displayed in galleries, restaurants, and corporate settings. I am also a public health advocate and art teacher who is committed to helping others use art to engage in personal healing and community dialogue.

In 2014, I created The Intimacy of Memory, a body of mixed media paintings based on grief, love and remembrance. The work examined why people chose particular objects or keepsakes after someone close to them died. I was interested in the ways in which an object represents the person who died and the shared relationship with the survivor. How do objects celebrate a life? How do objects prompt memory and how does this memory change over time?

This body of work seeded itself fifteen years ago when the biological mother of my adopted daughter, Taylor, died of AIDS. Taylor was six at the time. As I cleaned out her mother’s apartment, I had to decide what to keep. Which items would hold memories of her mother and offer Taylor comfort both in the moment and throughout her life? As I selected a few dishes, her mother’s favorite shirt, a locket, a mirror, I knew it wasn’t just what I kept but also what I didn’t keep that would play a role in Taylor’s recollections.

As part of this exploration, I interviewed participants and meditated on what I had heard. When I began to paint, the layers of color seemed to mirror the layers of their recollections: feelings of loss, love and longing. While many details faded into the background, what I felt most acutely was the sense of connection that stretched from the present to the past. I began to see how relationships and roles become fixed in time and space at the moment of death. How we forever remain mother/father/grandfather, husband/partner, sister/daughter/granddaughter.

As I exhibited this work throughout Massachusetts, I started to feel that I wanted to more closely connect my art life with the power of personal narrative. Since this initial body of work, I have begun to host Intimacy of Memory workshops.

The Intimacy of Memory workshops are designed to allow participants to make art based on the objects they kept after a meaningful loss in their life. It approaches the complexities of grief and love using art as a central connector. Because so many don’t have language for loss, art can play a pivotal role in communicating emotion and promoting healing.

Whether the loss is fresh or long past, this workshop gives artistic space and voice to the grief and love you may have been nursing privately. While the subject is heavy for many, there is often laughter and joy as people share memories.

But the work doesn’t stop there. After a workshop, participants are encouraged to hang their art in public space. The goal of the public exhibition is to promote a community conversation about death, grief and love, three subjects that are often privatized in the broader culture. I know how deeply painful loss can be, but we make the healing process that much harder by not giving our losses adequate  "time.” After all, grief is really just remembering how much we love and miss those we have lost.

In Evelyn Berde’s words, “I have always felt that art has the ability to lift us out of one place and take us to another.”

Evelyn is an artist, a teacher, a healer, and a patient herself. Born with congenital scoliosis in 1950, she spent many years in and out of Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), confined to her bed for months at a time. Her art is informed by her experience living with a “deformity”, as it was referred to in those times, as well as by her childhood growing up in the old “West End” of Boston, a low-income but culturally rich neighborhood close to MGH and the Charles River which was razed in the late 1950s, displacing many residents, and replaced by residential high rises which still stand today.

Evelyn’s childhood was marked by sadness—alcoholism in her family, the loss of her nine year old brother when she was six, not to mention her own medical condition—but it was also full of beauty, love and color. Her artwork portrays this complexity and texture.

Today, she is a wife, mother to two grown children, an art teacher and therapist as well as an extraordinary storyteller. She weaves her life stories into her art with skill and grace, and she reminds us all that we have the power within us to transform our experiences. “It’s all in you”, she says. “It’s hard to do, and it takes energy, but if you can focus on something that will bring you joy, even in the midst of tremendous sorrow and pain, it can shift everything.” 

You can listen to Evelyn talk about more of her paintings, and view the original publication of this piece on WBUR’s Commonhealth Blog here.