Trapunto, from the Italian ‘to quilt’, is a method of quilting also called ‘stuffed technique’. Its a puffy, decorative feature using at least two layers of fabric, whereby the underside is slit and padded producing a raised surface. At the time when artist Dee Kelly started to read Jane Clarke’s poetry, she was sampling the ancient art of hand quilting and trapunto in particular. The technique and the poem, Raspberries, seemed to meet in that perfect moment in time.
Sunday morning stillness
in a thicket of canes -
my mother reaches
for quilted berries,
eases them red and willing
from yellow stalks....
Raspberries, Jane Clarke
The ‘quilted berries’ of the poem brought Dee back to childhood tasks of planting raspberry canes with her father and jam making with her mother. Seven packed into the car, gathering wild blackberries on Sunday jaunts to the Dublin mountains, hands and clothes juice stained, a glass bottle of orange with a straw the highlight for the children and a pint for her father.
The poem beautifully captures the slow memory loss of the poets mother …”something has slipped into her mind and every night, like a stoat among voles, it hunts down her memories.” In response Dee started her piece ‘Not to Forget’ as a lap sized memory quilt, to touch and feel. As the work developed she wasn’t entirely happy with result so she very bravely unpicked it, bleached the background fabric to reduce its vibrancy and introduced the the woven raspberry leaves. Cut from pages of an old book, each leave is painstakingly woven and each branch has a message on the end leaf.
Dee encourages us to make a conscious decision to be the caretaker of family memories before they are lost, to cherish moments with our parents while we have them and to be patient and kind when aging and illness takes hold of the body and mind of those we love.
‘Spark-Flame-Wildfire’ is Dee’s second piece in the ROOTS exhibition and is in response to Jane Clarke’s poem, ‘Wildfire’. In April 2021 a wildfire damaged or destroyed a range of precious habitats over 2000 hectares in Killarney National Park, including ancient oak and other woodlands, wet heath, dry heath, blanket bog, exposed rock vegetation, and Molinia wet grassland. Dee feels heartbroken at the loss of plant and animal life.
...chiffchaff, robins, goldcrests
dropping light as twigs.
Pipistrelles and lesser horseshoes
shrivel as they fly....
Wildfire, Jane Clarke
In her art practice Dee salvages and recycles everything from kitchen packaging to vintage textiles as one small step in reducing waste, the dumping of which can sometimes cause forest fires. In this piece, Dee unraveled vegetable and fruit net bags to form the yarn used to stitch French knots into the background fabric. The wire outlining the flame is from the wire mesh covering a wine bottle.
The extraordinary patience it took to create the hundreds of French knots in this way is rewarded by a very dramatic finished piece. Recently one young visitor to the exhibition from a school in Sligo commented that he had seen red, orange and lemon coloured fruit/veg netting before, but he wondered what exotic thing was contained in purple netting? We had to check back with Dee for that answer as none of us had thought to ask – unfortunately it was nothing more exotic than shallots!
Dee’s love of nature is always evident in her artworks and these two pieces, though very different, are true to that love.
Thank you to Dee for sharing the background to her work. Thanks to Jane Clarke for her collaboration and to her publisher, Bloodaxe Books, for permission to use her poems. Thanks also to the OPW for the opportunity to exhibit and Kildare County Council for funding through the Arts Act Grant.
To see these works up close and personal, visit the exhibition ROOTS, a dialogue in textile and poetry, in the Coach House Gallery, Dublin Castle. Open 7 days a week, 10 am – 5 pm, closed for lunch 1.15 – 1.45 p.m.
Some of Jane’s books are now available in the gift shop in Chester Beatty Library next to the Coach House Gallery.