Awe and wonder

There’s no way I can do this justice in a blog post, but I’m going to try anyway: yesterday evening I attended a presentation about an amazing art project.

Esther Bryan is a local (Williamstown, near Lancaster) artist, painter, musician, piano teacher. 10 years ago she had an incredible creative vision of a work of textile art that would celebrate Canada’s Native and International cultural heritage, and so Invitation: The Quilt of Belonging was born. This photo, from its launch at the Canadian Museum of Civilization, gives you some idea of the huge size and scope of the work:

This quilt is 120 feet long by 10.5 feet high, and made up of 263 11-inch blocks: one for each native tribe/group in Canada, and one for each country of the world – because as of the 2000 Canadian census, there is someone from every nation on the globe who calls Canada home. And Esther and her volunteers spent six years tracking down someone from each and every tribe or native group, and each and every country, and had them create (and/or design, and/or contribute fabric or other textiles or materials for) a quilt block to represent their culture. She worked with Muslim women and native carvers and eastern European great-grandmothers and a young man from a tiny atoll in the south pacific. Some of the blocks are ‘traditional,’ like this delicately embroidered block representing Estonia. And some are beautiful works of modern art using traditional materials, or techniques. For example this “contemporary abstract design” made of white, tufted deer hair by an Abenaki native woman.

All the individual blocks, each with an amazing story (and Esther only had time to tell us three or four of those amazing stories last night – she could have talked all night and we would have sat transfixed, listening), was then pieced and quilted and the whole thing assembled by local volunteers:

Last night she told us the stories of the project’s conception, the challenges and triumphs of it’s creation, and the incredible reception it has had around the country, as it has travelled from St. John’s, Newfoundland to Iqualuit, Nunavut Territory, and showed us the pictures of its journey and its creators.

I’ll get to see it “in person” in May when it will be on display in Cornwall. After that it will be going to the 2010 winter Olympics in Vancouver.