For those who have been following the work of Marie Watt over the past several years, Blanket Stories: Receiving may come as a surprise. For one thing, her past sculpture and installations have often explored sculptural materials that are physically resistant and even indurate. Her monumental, elegant, bridgelike Pedestrian (2001), originally sited at River Overlook Park near the Steel Bridge in Portland, was made of slate, stone, and structural steel. Another contrasting work—and one with an added layer of irony because of its subject matter—is Watt’s 2002 installation Sleep and Sleeplessness: Blanket/Sieve, in which she crafted a bed pillow and “covering” out of milky alabaster set on the hard gallery floor. Watt’s current body of work, using discarded or secondhand wool blankets, seems at first like a complete reversal of her sculptural media. In fact, the blanket series only underscores the deftness of Watt’s abilities with formal qualities (i.e., materials) and her deep fascination with the quotidian elements of human nature. “I am particularly drawn to human stories and rituals implicit in everyday objects,” Watt has said. Blankets — as objects and as concept — yield a deep vein of possibilities.
Watt herself would tell you that she does not sew. Her interest in blankets, specifically wool blankets, evolved out of her recognition that blankets are markers of one’s life. If the average person sleeps seven and a half hours a night, or 220,000 hours in the average lifespan (that’s 25 years of sleeping around the clock), then one’s bedclothes take on an intimacy of significant proportions. Birth, death, and all of the human states that fall in between—dreaming, restless worry, sickness, sex, comfort, pillow talk—might somehow become imprinted onto the blankets like a lifetime chronicle of experience. Even physically, a new blanket may seem crisp and equilaterally rectangular—and years later, the same blanket takes on a shape of its own, revealing the bumps and tugs, stains and rips from human use.
In this exhibition, the monumental installation Three Sisters: Six Pelts, Cousin Rose, Sky Woman, and Relations uses approximately 200 reclaimed blankets as sculptural material. Watt folds the blankets, then stacks them from floor to ceiling, creating a column that is soft, tactile, and structurally contraindicative. Watt says that she is interested in the spaces between things, and while Three Sisters suggests architecture, it also suggests the space between earth and sky—a ladder as much as a column, a metaphor for the human lifetime that the blankets record.
Three Sisters is a purposeful reference to Constantin Brancusi’s 98-foot-high Endless Column (1938) in Târgu Jiu, Romania.1 The Endless Column is made of cast iron and steel; while it looks like a contiguous zigzag into the heavens, it is built of cast-iron modules that are threaded onto a carbon-steel spine. Likewise, Watt’s blanket columns appear simply stacked, but in fact they are threaded onto wires that invisibly stabilize the stacks. By the nature of the blankets, and their varying sizes, Watt’s columns create a jagged edge2 not unlike Brancusi’s column, a design element that connects Watt to makers of virtually every indigenous art form. The stacks also evoke totems of the indigenous tribes of the Northwest Coast. In some tribal traditions, a totem or totemic pole serves as a tribal signifier at the entrance to a home or village, a symbol of identification and hospitality. Likewise, Watt sees her stacks of blankets as a gesture of welcome, or receptivity.
Just as Watt considers her stacked blankets sculpture, she views her wall pieces as paintings. (In fact, the smaller-scale works called Samplers: Shields, Ledgers, Fractals, and Relations serve Watt as sketches for working out larger compositions.) Over time, Watt has amassed such a collection of blankets that she has a rich and varied palette of colors in vintage wool. Watt prevailed upon friends and acquaintances to give her their discarded blankets to build her cache—another example of the theme of giving and receiving. The idea of wool blankets is potent for the artist, not only for its intrinsic metaphorical content, but also for associations with her tribal heritage. Watt is half Seneca (Iroquois), and women of that tribe traditionally wear skirts made of beaded wool. Furthermore, the exchange of blankets for other goods is a well-documented enterprise between eastern native tribes and European Americans during the 18th and 19th centuries (as is referenced in Three Sisters: Six Pelts).
Equal and opposite to the associations wool blankets have to human experience, the highly graphic imagery that Watt employs references the history of 20th-century painting. Of course, the assemblage qualities of Flow of Time, Flag, In the Garden (Corn, Beans, Squash), Edson’s Flag, Water/Sky, and Braid suggest the 20th-century tradition of collage and perhaps even the boxes of Joseph Cornell. The central image of a target found in Flag and Water/Sky (and even the title Flag and the American flag sewn into Edson’s Flag) reference Jasper Johns’ seminal encaustic paintings, although Watt considers the image not as a bull’s-eye, but as concentric circles. Watt is an observant student of semiotics, and for her, the circle is the most elemental and rudimentary of symbols. (Again, every indigenous culture attributes a specific meaning to a circle form.) The cryptic title of Flag suggests not only the theme of identity, but also that the piece could be an insignia for unity.
In other wall works, Watt appropriates the bindings from blankets to create striped patterns. The edges of blankets, most often bound in a complementary color of satin, are the most vulnerable to years of use. It is here that Watt finds worn and frayed elements to attest to the blanket’s own history. The stripes of Water/Sky and those found in several of the Samplers connect Watt with painters like Frank Stella, Kenneth Noland, and more recently Susan Davies. Watt also likens the blanket bindings to the concept of ledgers, another method of recording history.
The diamond-shaped elements in In the Garden (Corn, Beans, Squash) and Braid derive from the star quilt, a pattern that recalls traditional Americana as well as a history of quilt making in Native American communities (probably adopted from early missionary wives). The nascence of Braid, perhaps the most ambitious piece in Blanket Stories: Receiving, was a concept for an environment that Watt originally envisioned as a room-size installation. She wanted to create a continuous symbol of infinity – a Möbius strip — in three dimensions, a huge braided rag rug that would envelop the viewer as he or she stepped inside it. Like the blanket sculptures, the Möbius strip has no beginning and no end; it could be considered a graphic symbol for the cycle of life. This image, flattened out, becomes the stunningly iconic motif of Braid, the pieced diamonds mimicking plaited rags. The bifurcated design — half in colorful rainbow hues, half in tones of black, white, and gray — is another nod to Watt’s formal concerns as an artist. Students of art typically learn first to master black and white as design elements, then they experiment with color as their skills evolve and mature. There is a formal relationship, too, between Watt’s wall pieces and her floor sculptures. Because of the large scale of the wall blankets, one could envision wrapping oneself in the works as a protective covering, negating the flatness of the wall works and turning them into sculptural forms as they might drape around a human body.
Along with the wall pieces and the Samplers, Watt has included eight prints that she made at Crow’s Shadow Press in Pendleton during the years 2002 to 2004. As with the Samplers, the smaller format of printmaking allows Watt to explore her ideas before committing to the monumental scale of the wall pieces. The colors of the print suites echo the muted tones of the wool—the dyes used to color the wool blankets seem to be consistently dusky and slightly faded. Works such as Portal correspond directly with later wall pieces. In the lithograph Portal (2002), Watt explored the notion of a dream catcher: what that might look like outside of Native American tradition and how it might affect or alter the passage of sleep time for the dreamer. The wool blanket version of Portal, titled Flow of Time (2003),3 incorporates actual strands of wool that loop up and down over the surface of the piece, then droop onto the floor. Other lithographs such as Braid (2003), Star Quilt (2003), and Blankets (2004) also serve as studies for the much larger wall pieces and floor sculptures.
An overwhelmingly significant component of Watt’s ambitious wall pieces is the element of community support the artist has received. She credits more than a hundred friends, family members, and total strangers who participated in sewing bees at Watt’s home studio through the past year.4 Water/Sky was almost completely crafted at sewing bees held at the Interstate Firehouse Cultural Center in Portland during the fall of 2004. This sort of collaboration is a long-held and revered tradition among women who have come together to engage in domestic activities— most obviously quilting, but also food preparation, and rituals that commemorate life passages such as bridal or baby showers. As much as Watt intends her work to tell stories to the viewers, the making of these works built a de facto community and allowed stories to be shared over needle and thread. This is art making at its most grassroots level, a process that connects artist to viewer in a way that is all too often absent in contemporary art.
A final component of Blanket Stories: Receiving that echoes the collaborative nature of Watt’s sewing bees is her Recipe Project. In 2004, the artist Roberta Lavadour found a wool envelope in a secondhand store in Pendleton, a chance discovery that reminded her of Watt’s interest in wool blankets. It was a simple blue-and-white houndstooth, undoubtedly a remnant from someone’s sewing basket. Upon opening the flap, she found a tiny message glued onto the envelope: “Put me in your purse and see, How handy recipe cards can be; As you coffee here and there, And find new recipes to share.” (Plus, a quaint notation: “Fabric by Pendleton Woolen Mills.”) Inside the envelope were 13 index cards; 9 of them had typed recipes: “Sour Cream Cookies, Great Grandma Zvn, 1900,” “Pendleton Presbyterian Church Chicken Salad,” “Huber’s Cole Slaw” (attributed to the famous Huber’s Restaurant in Portland, but adopted by Faith Presbyterian Chuch in Hermiston).
Watt’s thrift store gift spawned another collaborative and homespun project. Watt mused about the communal spirit that launches recipe swaps, how recipes, like blankets, are mementoes for events and relationships collected in one’s life — an ethnic favorite that instantly transports one to grandmother’s kitchen, a certain dish that is always present at holiday gatherings, an annual birthday cake.
Watt decided to continue the tradition of exchanging recipes, and sent a request for recipes to more than 75 friends and colleagues. In part, Watt’s request read: “During the course of our friendship, food has been a prominent or occasional component. I am writing to request a recipe of your favorite comfort food for a project I am working on.
Please be sure to include any backstory, observations on present day use, and source (cookbook, personal invention, family, handed-down, etc.).”5 Recipes, like blankets, can provide nurturance and sustenance, and through the fellowship of trading recipes, the participants cross cultural boundaries and foster community.
Watt’s intent was to assemble the recipes she collected and place the collections into hand-sewn woolen envelopes that would be returned to those who sent her recipes. This very practical process recalls both sculptural and printmaking works that Watt was working on concurrently. Watt’s Letter Ghost (Omphalos)6 was an actual envelope made of reclaimed wool and satin binding; her lithograph Letter Ghost, of the same imagery, was printed at Crow’s Shadow Press in the same year, 2003.7 The envelope form, again like blankets, is ripe with the suggestion of giving/receiving and intimates life-marking events (a birth announcement, a wedding invitation, a love letter, sad news). But here there is the added element of anticipation and the unknown, since the nature of an envelope is to conceal its contents.
In keeping with Watt’s fascination with the “in between,” the issues she deals with of giving and receiving, envelopment, time passage, ritual, and memory resonate as familiar themes in any human life. In sculpture, wall works, printmaking, and installation, Watt’s abilities weave beauty with concept, art making with community building, contemporary art with historic reference. Blanket Stories: Receiving is a gift from artist to her audience.
The majority of the work in the exhibition Blanket Stories: Receiving was in Watt’s solo exhibition at the National Museum of the American Indian, the George Gustav Heye Center in New York City (September to November 2004). Watt’s was part of a series of exhibitions called Continuum, which sought to illustrate how present-day Native American artists bridge the traditions of Native American art and issues of contemporary art. Blanket Stories: Receiving offers Watt’s Portland audience and her co-creators the opportunity to view work that has garnered the artist national recognition. In addition to Blanket Stories: Receiving, Watt has a concurrent exhibition at the Hallie Ford Museum in Salem called Everything Is Drawing (January 8 through March 5, 2005). Watt is also the 2005 recipient of the prestigious Eiteljorg Fellowship from the Eiteljorg Museum of American Indian and Western Art in Indianapolis. Watt lives in Portland and teaches at Portland Community College.