Two Itinerant Quilters by Lenka Clayton and Joanna Wright :: Supported by FRFAF (#2014-53)

In Two Itinerant Quilters, Lenka Clayton and Joanna Wright cut diamond-shaped holes from visitors’ clothes and replace them with new fabric, creating both a standard quilt made from volunteered materials and a walking-around-quilt of people with matching patches in their shirts. Presented as part of a multi-day public event, the project is a combination of a multi-media documentary, live performance, participatory documentary-object and online digital archive.

Two Itinerant Quilters premiered at the 2015 Open Engagement conference, a participatory art festival in Pittsburgh, and will continue until the quilt is completed at a series of festivals, conferences, city squares and other public sites internationally. The project was created with support from a microgrant from the Frank-Ratchye Fund for Art @ the Frontier (FRFAF) — an endowment founded to encourage the creation of innovative artworks by the faculty, students and staff of Carnegie Mellon University. With this fund, the STUDIO seeks to develop a cache of groundbreaking projects created at CMU — works that can be described as “thinking at the edges” of the intersection of disciplines.

The quilt grows as the piece is re-performed in various environments around the globe.

The quilt remains in one place; while its negative accompaniment continues to travel. Participants continue to wear their repaired clothes in their everyday lives, creating a secondary, "living" quilt.

Along with each fabric diamond, we collect the participant’s story of their life so far with the garment. These stories will become part of an interactive online narrative that may be navigated by clicking on individual fabric pieces (currently in development). Please click through the images below to read examples of stories.

In the 18th Century itinerant quilters used to travel from town to town in Wales (where Joanna Wright grew up) and Cornwall (where I grew up). They’d live with a family for long enough to create patchwork quilts for each bed using scraps of old clothing, feed-sacks and rags collected from the home.

Joanna Wright and I are both trained as artists and also as documentary filmmakers. Like many contemporary artists, we often travel from one project to the next residency; working with and representing found stories, objects and experiences of each new place. Two Itinerant Quilters investigates the common ground between these two professions, and between the traditions of contemporary fine art and traditional handcraft, while exploring the hidden, documentary nature of the everyday things that surround us.

The first iteration of Two Itinerant Quilters was partially funded by a Frank-Ratchye Fund for Art @ the Frontier grant, and performed during Open Engagement, a social practice conference held in 2015 in Pittsburgh, PA. Over three days we collected 127 diamonds cut from the clothing worn by conference attendees.

In March 2016 we set up our itinerant studio again at the True/False Documentary Festival in Missouri and collect 150 fabric diamonds from the clothing of documentary watchers.

The Space: a collaboration between the BBC and Arts Council England has amber-lit a digital extension of the project, including a short Itinerant Quilting tour scheduled at the moment to take place in England and Wales in 2017.