Before earning her MFA from Yale, Marie Watt, of Seneca descent, studied at the Institute of American Indian Arts, one of the venues lor her traveling exhibition Blanket Stories: Ladder. Its centerpiece was a group of 8-fool sculptures, the most imposing of which, Three Sisters (Cousin Rose, Sky Woman, Four Pelts, and All My Relations), 2004, consists of three looming stacks of folded wool blankets, each rising from a wood dais an the way to the ceiling. Watt – who could be called the anti-Andre – has taken what’s flat and horizontal and, through repetition and accumulation, given it verticality and height. In its impressive ascent, one of the stacks assumes a dancing, serpentine pose; the bodily associations are evocative, as are alusions to Native American culture – specifically, the importance of the woven blanket as an object of status and trade, or sale to whites. But Watt’s blankets are all ordinary plaids, stripes or solids, with borders of satin, selvage or fringe. She collected them far and wide; inventory tags occasionally poke out of the stack, bearing her notes in red ink on condition, color, binding, pattern.
The blanket’s familiarity in everyone’s life, from birth to death, gives warmth and resonance to Watt’s project. A transitional object for toddlers, comfort for the infirm, shelter for the homeless, indispensable to picnickers and dreamers, the blanket attracts memories like moths and becomes both material and subject matter for Watt. In Almanac (Glacier Park, Granny Beebe, Satin Ledger), 2005, she memorialized two folded-blanket piles in bronze and sandwiched several cloth blankets between them, injecting life into obdurate art. Canopy (Odd One) and Canopy (Omphalos), both 2005, are carved-wood representations of stacked blankets, resembling totem poles. Like those venerable symbolic objects, Watt’s sculptures evoke a family lineage, things handed down through generations, in this case the contents of hope chests or linen closets. “Omphalos,” or navel, is the site of bodily connection between generations, while “canopy” implies protection, whether provided by the forest overhead or a curtain covering the bed. Watt thinks of her stacks as ladders linking the earthly and the celestial; another rich metaphor is her concept of blanket as mnemonic text, underscored by titular references to ledgers and almanacs. Soliciting “blanket stories” from her audience, Watt placed an album in the gallery, where visitors recalled grandmothers’’ quilts, beach and baby blankets, rnilitary-issue bedrolls. One sensitive viewer compared Watt’s blanket stacks to earthen strata of compressed rock. ‘What would they reveal,” she wondered, “if unfolded, opened to the sun, aired of memories?”