RECYCLING & RESETTLEMENT: Fabric Collage as an Aid to Healing

Through these community quilt project events, visiting artist, Ai Kijima, aims to leverage both the environmental and social meanings of patchwork. Working closely with a team from Fiber and Material Studies: artist Carina Yepez, Danielle Lasker, Director of the Textile Resource Center, and Micro/Macro Textiles: Artist Research seminar students, will engage with our local and greater community to create a community patchwork quilt using second-hand and locally-sourced fabrics along with those brought by participants from their own personal collections. The project’s primary environmental impact will be to assert the importance of resource conservation, especially in the resource intensive industry of textile production, and to emphasize the beauty inherent in reused and reconfigured textiles. The project’s social impact will center on the creation of new community bonds via the shared creative experience of quilt making.

This project builds upon a pilot project launched in Tokyo, Japan in February 2023 with partners Nao Nomura of Saitama University and Marin Hanson of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL). They worked with the Musashino Social Welfare Corporation, a non-profit that serves adults with disabilities, to conduct workshops in which the organization’s clients worked collaboratively to make a community quilt. The goals of the project were to provide a collage-based art-making activity to a traditionally underserved audience, to involve members of the surrounding community, and to utilize recycled textiles in making a community art project. The materials were created by the clients based on their abilities and interests, they wove and embroidered their own fabrics as well as painted on donated recycled fabrics.

ENVIRONMENTAL AND SOCIAL IMPACT: Textile reuse is a longstanding tradition embedded in most worldwide cultures. From layered and patched boro textiles in Japan to amuletic garments made from donated fabrics in Central Asia, to patchwork quilts sewn by women in Gee’s Bend, Alabama, reusing fabrics in a patchwork or quilt format embodies many things — frugality, creativity, concern for the environment, communal sharing of resources, and spiritual connection to materials and to other humans beings. Fabric reuse is also intimately rooted in the work of Ai Kijima which uses collage and quilt making focusing on recycled domestic textiles obtained from thrift stores.

They also constructed the collage-style quilt blocks and put them together. Local quilt makers assisted in finishing the quilt. The final piece was shown at a local gallery and will hang at the non-profit’s headquarters. The success of the Tokyo pilot project was the first milestone in the current proposed project. 

AI KIJIMA is a Tokyo-born artist currently living in Brooklyn. Her distinctive works are chaotic collages: amalgamations of found material painstakingly stitched into evocative cross-cultural patchworks. She is a graduate of SAIC receding both a BFA in 2002 and an MFA in 2005. 

Aikijima.com

TEXTILE RESOURCE CENTER (TRC) is part of SAIC's network of Library & Special Collections and offers a hands-on collection to the SAIC community of global textiles dating from pre-Columbian to contemporary times. 

Visitors engage with textiles and books reflecting the broad array of materials, processes, patterns, designs, approaches, and cultures representing innovative historical and contemporary textile practices, as well as exploring conceptual approaches in the making of textiles throughout the world. 

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The MICRO/MACRO TEXTILES, Artist Research seminar uses the Textile Resource Center of the Department of Fiber and Material Studies as source material to explore artist research practices. An emphasis will be placed on slow looking and hands-on study of objects to gain an understanding of textile and fiber structures, material choices, modes of fabrication and production, while assessing larger frames of cultural context, meaning and metaphor. Through thoughtful guided close observation, we will learn about the complex lives of objects and the stories that they tell us to inspire and act as a foundation for our own creative work. Classroom guests will include artists and scholars from areas in conservation, science and engineering, and anthropology to extend our perspectives in how we view and understand objects. We will take field trips to the Art Institute, and also address topics in collections care, exhibition, installation, curation, and collections management. Students are expected to develop studio work, written research, and class presentations.  

www.micromacrotextiles.net