ŠElizabeth Cherry Owen 1999.Elizabeth Cherry Owen

"A Year and a Day."

52 1/2"h X 53 1/2"w.

Materials: Painted panels of letters of the ogham alphabet; embrodiered panels of 4 phases of the moon with shisha mirror work; panels of scarily compulsive, detailed beading of Perry Ellis' fruit fabric.

Embrodiery, hand quilting, and hand dyed fabric, using a variety of surface design techniques.

The first line of the catalogue/notebook that I keep on all my finished quilts reads: "Ugly apple/cherry pie dishtowel from Odd lots." My relationship to this quilt was problematic from the beginning. Susan and I had a running discussion about whether the pie in the center of the dishtowel was an apple or cherry. My vote was always cherry (it is my middle name after all.) There are references to the disagreement in the representation of fruit I chose to embellish.

The quilt felt my ambivalence and fought me every step of the way. This craft form is usually associated with "women's work," and is therefore supposed to be gentle and meditative, but this quilt always felt like a man to me. But I was trying to impose a circular system of tracking the passage of time onto the Roman linear system, which is nothing if not patriarcal. Well, the dishtowel didn't approve. The quilt retains a record of our struggle: there is a spiral movement around the cherry PIE WITH A LITTLE AREA OF CALM IN THE MIDDLE, LIKE THE EYE OF A HURRICANE. I intended to superimpose the celtic lunar calendar, delineated by the magical ogham tree alphabet on the now-traditional Roman linear calendar.

The traditional celtic way of speaking about the marking of the passage of time is the "wheel of the year," a phrase I love. In the celtic calendar system, each of the 13 lunar months and the extra day are assigned at least one ogham alphabet glyph. These glyphs stand for the magical trees in the celtic system. (Robert Graves' "The White Goddess" treats this in detail.) This system of 13 months and one extra day is still preserved in the fairy tales in which the heroine or hero is given a test or trial which lasts for "a year and a day." In many traditions, this is also the length of time of training for a novice priestess.

Many thanks to Susan Lucky Tomato Shie, for her friendship and patience with my ridiculous tardiness. Even though I was 5 months late, she never got impatient with me. This was truly a "challenge project" in the best tradition of quilt making.

©1999 Elizabeth Cherry Owen. Devilled Egg Studios. 1213 Glenmore Ave, Baton Rouge, LA. 70806-7029. 225-338-0422. Note: In 2005 Elizabeth is living in Maine. devilled@tidewater.net.

 

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