The Fabric Within: Reflections on caregiving, secondhand garments, and the ghost of a cedar tree

Banner image: In Tension, installation view at Form+Content. Image courtesy of the gallery.

 

How do we care for ourselves and others in a country that doesn’t mirror that care back? How does feeling unsupported influence how we show up and what we create? How is fabric a place where tensions can be adjusted, and where reconstruction can be tested? With In Tension, four artists share a devotion to unmaking and remaking and commit to feeling the crises along the way. Utilizing the restrictive yet supportive quality of fabric, Michelle Westmark Wingard, Laura Wennstrom, Kehayr Brown-Ransaw, and Rachel Breen share and hold space for imagined systems of care, the cultural neglect of women, mothers, and caretakers, and the unfettered expression of these disorderly realities — bra cup inserts, oven mitts, and cedar trees included.

Laura Wennstrom cleverly holds hostage the parental overwhelm and environmental anxiety she feels, letting her creative work build from the foundation of these daily frustrations. Speaking about the naturally persistent demands of raising young children, she says, “The constant state of interruption is exhausting and is a pretty universal, all-consuming part of living with children. Instead of trying to ignore this dynamic, it has been creeping into my work until lately, it has become the sole focus.”

 

Laura Wennstrom, Support System, 2024. Bra pads/ inserts, thread. Image courtesy of the gallery.

 

Wennstrom takes what is ordinary and mundanely domestic and stretches its capacity, stitching it into something more ambitious in meaning. Support Structure is a nebulous, vertically installed mass made up of an abundance of bra pad inserts.

“The artwork I am making is a visual manifestation of this sensation of overwhelm," she says. "I want it to be relentless and overwhelming. But it is also kind of funny, because these objects are like little harmless markers of more pervasive issues. I'm really into that tension.”

 

Laura Wennstrom, Artemis: Goddess of Fertility, 2024. Oven mitts, thread. Image courtesy of the gallery.

 

Wennstrom nails the ironic and somewhat facetious tone, especially with the titles Support Structure and Artemis: God of Fertility (a tapering heap of oven mitts), these allusions biting at insubstantial systems of care and the red herrings that promise respite. “Where we lack everyday intimacy with the people in our communities, it is abundant in the world of secondhand objects. The objects I am working with are inherently domestic, many inherently feminine. Spending so much time at the thrift store makes our overconsumption glaringly obvious.”

In a way, Wennstrom’s works act as a microcosm of these capitalistic, consumptive tendencies; the work approaches the grotesque with its repetition of domestic material, since we don’t see stock amounts of an item unless we’re shopping. The armies of objects in these works remind me of the aliens in the Toy Story movie, grouped side by side in the claw machine, together waiting for their fate.

 

Michelle Westmark Wingard, Re-Rooted (for Marilyn), 2024. Cyanotype on fabric. Image courtesy of the gallery.

 

Among other photographic processes, Michelle Westmark Wingard works in cyanotype, exposing rocks from the north shore and for this show, exposing the whole of a dead cedar tree from her backyard. Titled Re-Rooted (for Marilyn), she remarks on her mom who had wanted to be an artist but grew up in a family and societal system that didn’t see artistry as a viable career path. Not flourishing where she was rooted, Westmark Wingard wonders what would have happened if her mother had been rooted elsewhere, just like she wonders if the cedar would have survived if planted elsewhere.

While the group of us talked in the gallery, she pulled a book out of her bag titled How Not to Exclude Artist Mothers (and other parents) by Hettie Judah. “Historically speaking," Westmark Wingard says, "systems have not been designed for caregivers to thrive, and art that’s been shown in museums has not been about care or about kids, or about that life choice.” And it’s true, artist residencies are rarely inclusive spaces for people with children, and a lot of the successful women artists looked up to are not mothers.

 

Michelle Westmark Wingard, ReOrdered (Pine Boughs/pink), 2024. Cyanotype and thread on fabric. Image courtesy of the gallery.

 

Regarding Re-Rooted (for Marilyn), fabric allowed the piece to be monstrous and still fit in the gallery space. “It’s not a scale I’ve worked at before and I feel like it has a presence that I’m unfamiliar with, and I think that Laura’s has that feeling as well, this monumentality”, says Westmark Wingard. It appears that in the shared isolation of institutional betrayal, a monumental sense of solidarity creates itself. 

 

Rachel Breen, Banner for the Commons #7 (detail), 2024. Used clothing, thread, embroidery floss, printing ink. Image courtesy of the gallery.

 

Rachel Breen is thinking about clothes. She’s thinking about how they're made, who made them, and the cyclical consumption of trends that masks the real human labor comprising the latter. Originally taking thrift store clothes apart and displaying them spread eagle style, Breen wanted to spotlight how clothes are constructed in the first place. However, as seen in her exhibited pieces Banner for the Commons #7 and Banner for the Commons #8, she has recently been putting the garments “back together in a new way, kind of as a metaphor for reimagining and rethinking systems as they exist," she explains. "So the work really is a process of collage.”

Taking inspiration from the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) banners, Breen adds embellishments like buttons and gold embroidery to the conglomeration of fabric, emulating the tassels and trim characteristic of the union banners. The pieces end up being symmetrical of course, unintentionally illustrating the surface area of our bodies through fabric, like winged homages to the makers of the clothes and the people who wore them. The women of the ILGWU were mostly young, Jewish immigrants. And those with families were likely navigating the impossible expectations to raise kids, work a labor-intensive job, and organize to resist poor work conditions in the women’s clothing industry.

 

Rachel Breen, Banner for the Commons #7, 2024. Used clothing, thread, embroidery floss, printing ink. Image courtesy of the gallery.

 

Breen enjoys making these pieces even with the labor they require, and she connects that to thinking about what it’s like to work for social change, and the importance of bringing joy into that work. “Something compelling about this show is that we each are in a different stage of life and are approaching similar themes of care and security and concern in unique yet overlapping ways,” says Wennstrom. “One of the things I really like about this body of work is that other people, other women, get it. They look at the work and know exactly what it is about, that the work is speaking to their life, their lived experience in a way I know nothing about”

 

Kehayr Brown-Ransaw, To know my mother and only know her name feels like not knowing myself at all, to know my mother and to know her heartbeat feels like knowing her warmth, 2023. Image Transfer, cotton fabric, Longarm Quilting by Jill Slipper Sholtz. Image courtesy of the gallery.

 

Kehayr Brown-Ransaw was raised by mostly women, in a family that embraced aunts that weren’t blood related and the adopting of additional members. Now being separated geographically from that maternal hearth of family, there remains a feeling of estrangement. With his work, Brown-Ransaw tries to understand those familial stories of separation and belonging, wondering how his family members’ experiences affect his experiences and parsing them all into meaning through the making of quilts.

Buying kits from SR Harris to cut down on the fabric waste that notoriously collects in a textile artist’s studio space, he challenges himself to “take what was already prewritten and restructure what was written.” Brown-Ransaw works in 4.5 inch blocks, so he adapts the kit to his methods. The result is something very tender, and relating to the domestic space once again. Like the garments Breen deconstructs and reconstructs in her banners, these quilts have the potential to clothe you, or even swaddle you. There is a steadfast grandmotherly care at play with quilts, the multiple layers joined by the swirly pattern of the longarm stitchwork.

 

Kehayr Brown-Ransaw, To know my mother and only know her name feels like not knowing myself at all, to know my mother and to know her heartbeat feels like knowing her warmth (detail), 2023. Image Transfer, cotton fabric, Longarm Quilting by Jill Slipper Sholtz. Image courtesy of the gallery.

 

In To know my mother…, as well as his three smaller pieces, a gauzy image was xylene transferred onto a rectangular strip of fabric near the center of each quilt. “I wanted to stay away from photography because I saw it as my mom's thing," he says, "but I’m realizing that because it was her thing it’s something that is so important to me." There are photos of his mother before she was a mother and of his grandmother without her children in frame, and Brown-Ransaw feels an importance in seeing these women as more than caretakers. The photos in the quilts are to scale, giving the tactile recollection of holding a 3 inch square photo in the hand. Brown-Ransaw remarks that the xylene transfer is not a perfect process but a very fault-stricken one, resulting in inconsistencies and unpredictabilities with how the image transposes.

In his work there is a tension between honoring the maternal influences in his life and examining what hardship those influences must have endured. Brown-Ransaw, who is younger than the other three artists in this show, mentions how many folks in his generation look down on those having kids. Meanwhile he thinks back to the generations of women who found purpose and meaning in having kids. Often the level of care and attunement we desire as a community is a job delegated solely to parenthood, creating pressure and the need for self-preservation. “All the talk about parenting versus career," notes Breen, "the way that it's framed is that it’s one or the other, or that they’re pitted against each other."

“Kehayr’s work about mothers is in the presence of three women artists who all happen to be mothers, sometimes at the expense of our own practice”, says Westmark Wingard. Being the one to open the gallery some mornings after the fans haven't been running, she can smell “the tiniest fragrance of other lives…there's maybe somebody’s lingering perfume, or the smell of food being made. People's lives are kind of contained in these objects, and they're still here somehow.” There is a malleability about the material in each piece of this show, allowing for honest expressions of both care and neglect to come through. And since fabric is always with us, from the moment we’re wrapped in cloth after birth, we must always be with fabric too. ◼︎ 

 

In Tension, installation view. Photo by Cory Eull.

 

In Tension is on view at Form+Content Gallery through December 14. Gallery hours are Thursday – Saturday, 12 – 6pm. Follow the gallery on Instagram @formcontentgallery.

To see more of Laura Wennstrom's work, visit her website or follow her on Instagram @laurawennstrom.

To see more of Michelle Westmark Wingard's work, visit her website or follow her on Instagram @westmarkwingard_art.

To see more of Rachel Breen's work, visit her website or follow her on Instagram @rbbreen.

To see more of Kehayr Brown-Ransaw's work, visit his website or follow him on Instagram @_kiwi1997.