Medicine Sanctuary

This quilt was started during an artist residency the United Plant Savers Botanical Sanctuary in August 2023. It's a scrappy ‘map’ of the sanctuary lands, or my interpretation of the land as I experienced it in late Summer. For two weeks, I stayed in a quiet yurt at the sanctuary, spending most of my time alone, either walking the sanctuary trails or sewing. I brought boxes and buckets of fabric and scraps from my own stash, but also acquired a few pieces of remnant fabric from a local quilt shop.

As with most quilts I make, I am limited to whatever fabric is around — I don’t purchase new fabric to ‘fit’ a project idea. This is a big part of my creative process — even if I have an idea for a quilt, I let the available materials (fabric colors, textures, etc.) inform the design. Often times, the result is something I didn’t expect — sometimes I love it, sometimes I think it’s ‘ugly,’ but it grows on me.

Medicine Sanctuary is one of the ‘ugly’ quilts that I adore, because as random and chaotic as it may seem, every decision and detail was intentional, and is representative of my experience of the sanctuary. I’ll do my best to decode it for you.

The botanical sanctuary is an oblong piece of land - if you look at this quilt as a ‘map,’ the the bottom points east and the top is west. I experienced this place as having two ‘zones’ which I interpet in the top and bottom portions of the quilt. A zone of human activity with mowed areas, actively managed garden plots, strips of managed prairie, and buildings (the light bright, floral area at the bottom) and a forest zone (the dark/neutral colored, earthy, mossy area at the top) that was robust and healthy in parts (top left) and also had a distinct area of reclaimed mine land where there was lots of exposed rock, some bare ground, and younger tree/shrub/plant communities (top right).

There are little details throughout that depict things that I noticed: green courduroy ‘moss,’ indigo shibori ‘spiderwebs,’ ‘stone’ colored fabric, square cross ( + ) ‘first aid’ symbols in the reclaim area… It’s hard to see these things virtually, but click in the detail photos below to get a little sense of how the abstract shapes and stitching make up the landscape:

I revived my drawing practice a little with illustrations of a few plants I saw at the sanctuary. I saw more plants than I could possible represent in this quilt, but I illustrated a few of my personal favorites: beech leaves, echinacea, wild sunflower, plantain, acorns, wild ginger, goldenseal.