By Remi Adeoti
I had a pessimistic view of our future. With everything that has happened this year I feel as if this is the beginning of a movement that will lead to a civil war. Tensions have been high and it doesn’t seem like they will lessen or change will occur. What I tried and am still working to depict is the ending our country by our history. The phrase that I got from this was “Hung by your past”, which is similar to the phrase “come back to bite you”
The first thing I created was a 2 colored doll, with a rope wrapped around its neck and body. With this I wanted to allude to lynchings that occurred in the 1860’s till around the late 1960’s. To do this I drew of the wrong side of the fabric and then sewed the two pieces together, leaving a space open so that I could flip it inside out. I then suffer the head and limbs with rice so that they had a nice hang un filled the rest of the body with stuffing. The difficulty with this figure was that the fabric I used was delicate, and came apart very easily.
This is an up-close image of the roots of the tree that I drew with the sewing machine. I enjoyed the texture that this gave the tree and felt as if it did look like roots which was what I was going for.
I then sewed the rope around one of the branches I created to give the effect that the top was tied around the tree. I wanted this to show Black people being hung by roots, because roots are usually tied to history. So this is meant to show what has happened in the past.
I also sewed the top of the tree which represent the present/future. This piece was tedious and took a large time because of the lazy Daisys and separating the different embroidery flosses so that I could have different mixture of greens. It also took time because I stuffed each other branches and had to cut multiple holes to get this raised effect.
Finally I created a character depiction of a KKK member. To do this I first created the figure and stuffed it, after I used red embroidery thread to sew this on the silver fabric. The most difficult part of this piece was the rope, I found that it mattered how fast this was running under the sewing machine and it made a difference in how spaced out or close together the sticking was. I also struggle with keeping the stick in line, because the position of the needle was sometime misleading.
I plan to keep working on this and make it a story quilt with more patches of symbols of our present and future that connect now.