GK Bigler
Grace K. Bigler is a textile artist, maker, and quilter in Portland, OR. Through sewing, they work earnestly to create joy and to honor meaning in every project, big and small. Dynamic patterns meet keen color schemes in a mix of traditional and modern piecing, made deliberately with intention and care. With a background in education and youth development work, Grace is a quilter and artist interested in both teaching and learning from others in creative community.
Let’s Play (2023)
One of my favorite things to do as a quilter is to play around with my scraps, so this year’s theme was the perfect invitation to do that! As I was making this wonky log cabin piece, I was thinking about how important the invitation to play itself really is.
For too many of us, adulthood becomes synonymous with alienation, feeling left out, challenges with connecting and making friends… for those who view it, I hope this block sparks a felt memory of being invited to do something fun, innocent, mischievous, creative, colorful, cute, and playful! And a reminder to ask your friends to hang out and play!
The Barbie movie made me remember all the times I was asked to come over and play at neighborhood friends’ houses growing up. (I didn’t have any of my own Barbie stuff, but my friend Julia sure had all that crazy fun shit! The wetsuit Barbie with the rubbery Orca whale? A wedding gown with little pieces of crunchy leaves stuck in the tulle? I can still smell the Dreamhouse plastic toasting in the sun.) How lucky I was to have such generous kids around me who liked to share and play with me! Making this block helped me feel into the gratitude I have for all the moments of active inclusion that were extended to me by my friends and their families growing up.
Neon Ruins (2022)
Monuments help us, personally and communally, to remember the things we deem worth remembering. I used a traditional piecing method to create an angular shape to represent the top of a pillar. I included a combination of green scraps from an old abandoned project and a neon green construction company t-shirt that my partner received on a temp job where the task involved breaking down a large temporary structure.
Sometimes, when bogged down by deep worry about the future, I need help remembering the resiliency and fluidity of nature. I made this block in an effort to reassure myself, and hopefully others, to trust in the dynamic powers and sacred wisdom of our planet. We are, and our future ancestors will be, a part of its divine processes of creation and destruction.
Leaning into this trust allows us the energy and focus needed to resist the forces that are accelerating climate disasters around the world. I hope that our future ancestors will see our monuments: physical evidence of our activism, remnants of our values solidified through our art – and know who we were well enough to remember us.
Our Envisioned Futures (2021)
think a lot about museums and the work they do to bridge the past to the future, anchored in the present moment of the visitor’s experience with the exhibits. There are some institutions that do this well, and some that really struggle (and ultimately fail) to pull it off. I’d like to live in a future where we, whether institutionally or personally, hold the painful truths of the past with curiosity, understanding, structure, and respect. In choosing to approach this project with a focus on my own personal story, I wanted to use this opportunity to address some challenging aspects of my past, and then come up with a way to reframe the story in a new way. After all, we need to look at how we used to do it in order to do it differently moving forward.
I wanted to use these specific pink and blue scraps because they are connected to a past relationship that ended very poorly. The cream colored border piece is a bit more complicated. Perhaps the most painful personal textile I own is my own baby blanket, which I have in my closet and absolutely couldn’t bring myself to cut for this block, even though it is tattered and wouldn’t be much affected by my taking a piece. I still wanted to include a representative fabric, even if I couldn’t get myself to cut from the original source, so I found something that reminded me of the lining of my baby blanket.
In combining these elements (the blue and pink representing a mother figure and partner who are no longer part of my life, and the off-white from “my” baby blanket), the finished piece has turned into a commentary on gender, motherhood, and what we show vs. what we conceal when it comes to gender expression.
In this present moment of my life, I am able to look back at my past self and see them with compassion: a young person who was struggling with identity, working to achieve love from others based on conditions surrounding gender performance, and learning to live with the unmet desire to simply be cradled and held “as-is:” that is, complicated, changing, undefined, imperfect, and non-binary. I’ve decided to call the central square the Baby square, because of its use of traditional, gendered baby colors, quilting patterns, and textures. I am hopeful and grateful for the idea that as we move forward into our future, the gender binary can melt away into a more free-flowing format of expression, existence, growth, and being.
This little square is held up in the structure of a larger square that is meant to function as a picture frame. I struggled with how to construct something that would “hold” the image in the center, although I think I might have overthought it and made it more difficult for myself than it needed to be. Had I not been working on this piece in isolation, I could have sought guidance from those who know how to build a frame or sew fabric in such a way that it could resemble and function as a frame. The future that I imagine is one where we are interconnected and share our resources, knowledge, and skills freely in the spirit of mutual aid and lifelong learning. I also included fabrics that feature written text and composition notebook patterning to represent that our stories can be shared through writing, allowing those stories to enter and interact with the sacred community of readership.
I’m very grateful for the opportunity to have worked on this project. I am so excited to see how others approached the theme, and how our pieces will fit together in one quilt. Cheers to a beautiful, authentic, and sustainable shared future!