I’m making a quilt for my friend who’s home is one of my favorite places to spend an afternoon or evening over a cup of tea (made the correct way - the English way.) Their house is a wonderful mashup of the 1950s and the 1970s. Scandinavia meets a Northwoods Wisconsin cabin with oranges, greens, and golds. It’s full of light, perfectly creamy white walls, and a bold yet cozy color palette.
For me, every quilt starts with a room and its colors. I brought some fabrics that I had dyed and quilts to her home to talk about color. One block stood out: The oh so very scandi, New York Beauty. It wanted to live here. The red, ivory, blue, and gold sang in that room. This quilt block has always been her favorite of mine. (I’ve written about it here.) But I said to her, “I can’t give you a quilt that might not be finished for another ten years.”
I have made a few runs at finishing this quilt with optimistic expectations and failed. It’s no wonder - it’s an immense undertaking. The final quilt will include 165 pieces per block. At 48 blocks, the quilt will include almost 8000 tiny pieces of linen.
Every time I start making progress, I run into problems. I run out of a color. First the ivory-colored linen. I dye some more which turned out much darker than the last. I tried again and ended up with something much more grey. It took me several tries over a year to find the right formula for the bright ivory I want. Then I ran out of madder red. I ordered more and realized I bought the wrong dyestuff. Madder comes in different forms: Rubia tinctorum from Central Asia and the Middle East (the one I wanted), and Rubia cordifolia from India and Pakistan (the one I bought). I got mixed them up. The madder-red, Rubia cordifolia, turned a lovely orangey red, very different from a truer red. Problem, solution, new problem. This has been the story of this quilt.
It makes sense why this has been more difficult than my other projects which are between 400-1600 pieces. This design will be ten times as complex as my average quilt. Average quilts are no simple thing on their own. This quilt is the epitome of the obsessive aspect of quilting.
This quilt frustrates me with more questions than answers. I made yards and yards of new fabric, perfecting my favorite ivory. I learned to dye indigo more confidently. I gained an understanding of the different types of madder. I’ve found better materials for foundation paper piecing that don’t have to be removed. I’ve worked out how to make that tiny star at the center of the block in this heavy linen.
While is the perfect quilt for this space and that gold couch, my friend needs one I can finish in a reasonable amount of time. So one day as I looked at all the new fabric I had dyed, a new idea emerged. I had been studying Ohio Star quilts designed on point so I already had some ideas in that direction. Over just a handful of days, I cut and sewed together all the pieces for a new Ohio Star quilt in those perfect colors.
I love this new quilt. I would never have made it if it wasn’t questioning and worrying my way through its mother. If hadn’t made all that extra fabric. My life is littered with half-made projects and overrun with messes and questions.
I am what Freud would have referred to as a typical hysteric. The problem for the hysteric is that we can struggle to make decisions. We can start, but it is much harder to finish. I am an artist, who only recently learned how to act amid my questions and mess. Around my dozens of half-started projects. I do things out of order. I give birth to one thing while being pregnant with something else. It’s truly absurd. Its hysterical. Or maybe I am. At least I do love to laugh at all these messes I make.
Freud used the categories hysteric and obsessive to describe the issues that most people suffer from. They are the two sides of the neurotic psychological structure.
The obsessive believes every puzzle piece fits and every rule will complement the next. None of us consciously believe this but we unconsciously act it out. You can see that in a lot of quilting culture. These productive quilters are incredible. I am frequently amazed at the confidence they exude with their craft. When I see someone who is super productive I am so jealous. They seem so confident from the outside. I imagine that they have escaped the prison of anxiety that I live inside. How do they know what they want? How do they avoid the anxiety that I face in front of my questions? But they do not escape. It may be hard to see under the guise of all that activity but it is there. When contradiction strikes, problems begin to manifest.
My friend had asked for one thing: to avoid using white. She has two little kids and a cat so she is worried about stains. But…I made her a quilt top with the base color of white. I expect to make the back white as well. How is it that I set out to do one thing and end up doing something else? I felt like her house told me what to do. (I did ask her before I went ahead with it. We had a long evening talking about it in front of her wood stove this winter. We all laughed when we realized the large pile of ivory and white blankets stacked in the corner. At the core of my design process is the idea of working in collaboration with a room to design a quilt. Luckily, we agreed to take on the risk of white.
When a quilter begins a quilt, we look at a blank canvas - an infinite design space. A blank blanket of opportunities for color, texture, and form. We employ the obsessive strategies from the quilting tradition and ones we create for our own practice to reduce the possibilities and maintain some control.
Obsessives seem to have the advantage in their decisiveness. They believe that the world is ordered and therefore they can act with confidence. But it is said that the obsessive must be hystericized for them to fully engage in psychoanalysis. When the obsessive runs into a block they turn to stone, unable to bend without breaking so they have to become open to questioning.
Quilting is an obsessive art form. The pattern and repeats that tell us what to do next. This is one reasons it is so comforting. It is a relief from the anxiety of too many unknowns. I am drawn to rules in my own life for the same reason. When I can lean on a set of rules, whether it is in designing a quilt, how to act at work, social manners, or child-rearing, I am more comfortable. This is the obsessive pleasure of quilting.
On the other side of the spectrum is the hysteric. The hysteric doesn’t see order but only disorder. We question everything, questions that start small but then take root and grow till we are like Hamlet questions about existence itself. “To be, or not to be? That is the question.” Hamlet lands at this existential crisis after spending his days brooding over every other lesser question. He drives everyone around him crazy with his questioning. Finally, he drives everyone to death with his questions.
In art, life, and of course, in quilting, there is always a part of the pattern that doesn’t fit. A lot of human behavior is described as a way of relating to the aspects of our lives that don’t fit. It’s like we are trying to patch up a hole in the structure of our lives.
We all have to deal with the gap. Some do it with a hyper relationship to order, the obsessive, others constantly question the rules to the point of inaction, the hysteric. One through line in my work is to explore how the hysteric approach has the advantage. If we can learn to act without having to feel secure in how things will turn out, we hysterics have the advantage of acting more freely. While it offers a considerable creative advantage, it comes with bad sleep, stomach pain and hair pulling. Without the anxiety, we can’t be free. It’s in this dizzying, unknowing space that we open up to something new.
That’s not a very exciting-sounding view of life and society that I am describing. “Anxiety with a side of anxiety, please!” But the beauty of freedom is enough for me.
Quilts offer structure. They are calming. But while that order feels safe, art and beauty are about pushing past the comfort zone. I want to make something new. Something that surprises me and makes me feel both excitement and a little unease. I want to make a quilt I have never seen before. And this requires an element of risk and vulnerability.
thank you Sarah for another beautiful and thought provoking post. Putting names like a hysteric or a obsessive to what I do is fun. I just do it. I do think about it, but I have never really tried to categorize my practice in Freudian terms, and am thankful for your writing that leads the way in this. xo
As always, I am so grateful for your writing. In my art, I often feel like I flip-flop between hysterics and obsession.
Order feels comforting when the chaos is too much, but I long for all that is fresh and uncharted, unique.
My soul knows hysterics are the path to that 😂
When I lean into hysterics certain mantras help me like “let go of the outcome” or “just hit singles” (baseball reference.)
How bout you? What does your self-talk look like while you’re in process?