Diary and Research Notes of the Video Quilt (April 2025)
Video Quilt Test Rough Assembly
I have been thinking about this project for a very long time especially at times when I miss my family who are so far away. I have always had a somewhat fragmented family, a family from England, Ireland, and the United States. A great big family, who with each generation, myself included, move to the other side of the continent they have settled on. It feels like a patchwork and at times, especially over the past 3 years as my immediate family has divided through divorce and separated but tried so hard to stay close and stay friends.
I have wanted to weave myself and my families histories back together, touching at the edges for meals, birthdays, vacations and reunions. Finding ways to intersect. Intersecting inside myself all my identities, that I know I inherited from my family. My neurodivergences, disabilities, my hair, my eyes, even my gayness I see in distant cousins, my non-binariness – how we fold together. As I travelled to find work, to find a new home, new love, new school, I bring a few treasured family items to remind me of where I come from, which are from everyone I have ever loved; people, not places. My great grandmother’s patchwork tea cozy, my grandmother’s crochets, my other grandmother’s Irish-American quilts, patches and stickers from arts events, bands, rallies, and many collectives. They are scraps of dresses from the 1920s, WWII parachute silk, patches from organizations like Rock Camp 4 Girls+, bands like RAW RAW RIOT, parties like Electric Pow Wow, and our common phrases like We Respect Pronouns. They are jean jackets full of pins, sleeves torn off and sewn up like Frankenstein’s monster’s 😉 skin.
My media art practice is often made up of collage, of chroma keying layers of video and I have a photo practice often examining architecture, text and geometric shapes. So the video quilt, I began to see all around me, before the technology was really strong enough to handle it in the processor. As I became a projection technician installing my own and others’ large format pieces for music festival, arts presenters, theatres, dance, and VJing large performances including programmer and technician at Arboretum Art and Music festival from 2012-2017, Available Light Screening Collective 2013-2015, Ottawa Explosion 2011-2012, Pop Montreal 2016, JUNOFest 2017, Carleton University Art Gallery Tomoni Events 2017, Flying Horses tours 2018-19, Speaking Vibrations theatre, poetry and dance tours 2019-2023, Winter Arts Festival Victoria (Vancouver Mural Festival) 2024, and Lumiere Festival 2024 projection mapping the front of the Vancouver Art Gallery – I have a feeling about how we see, feel and read the moving image in relation to scale.
The Video Quilt is a community collaborative project that sits outside my work at the University of Victoria (as stated by the letter by my supervisor and “Witness Blanket” artist, Carey Newman). After donating labour to an arts collective MOVE37XR, they have agreed to exchange use of their two 26k lumen projectors capable of architecture mapping nearly 60m wide and 40m high for two weeks. I will host a 2 afternoon community based workshops or “Video Quilting Bee” at an accessible community location presented in partnership with CineVic, Ministry of Casual Living, and Flux Media Net and invite anyone from the community (10 people maximum) to come and bring movies from their phones or hard drives where myself and 2 other technicians will assist in putting their videos into the quilt templates. I will pre-setup geometric patterns after conducting some family research and creating my own video quilts and invite folks to select a couple different patterns, or submit their own photos of tapestries to be assessed ahead of time, if I can create an easy template. Then these quilts will be presented at the Victoria Winter Arts Festival, created by Vancouver Mural Festival and on the exterior of the University of Victoria McPherson Library Building one week in February and one week in March, 2026. The result will be 11 Video Quilts, 1 for me, 10 for the participants.
The sound of the Video Quilt for my original piece will be some source and some improvised on location for the presentation. For the participants they can create an original score or ask for a song to be played at the same time, without original or licensed music the final piece will be provided to the participant without sound. Education about music copyright will be provided. The copyright for each video quilt made by a participant will be held by the video participant, which I will provide to them in writing. I will retain the copyright only for my own Video Quilt.
Concurrently there would be a zine accompaniment sharing a short story for each quilt and some images from the quilts and patterns. In the past I had created a zine for projection installation Green Gazing (funded by Ontario Arts Council and toured at Workman Arts, Ada X, DARC, and VMF 2018-2024) and they make great companion art pieces that explain the open source ideas of the technology of the project with qualitative art and storytelling.
Like with the work I do in the community, mentorship for the creation of the templates and projection installation will be provided by myself and other underrepresented technicians in media arts. Similar to the training programmes I have offered through DARC, CineVic, through funding of my films projects by the BC Arts Council, StoryHive and at the University of Victoria, I will be prioritizing hiring and offering the free Quilting Bee workshop to members of BIPOC, gender expansive, women-identifying, members of the disabled community or disabled, queer or LGBTQ2SIA+, the generationally poor / low-income, or another non-listed affected community.
Personally, for my practice, it will move ahead this imagined collective collaborative technical environment I don’t get to participate in my school and bring elements from my family and friends directly into my daily practice and meditations (obsessions). My love of technology, is my love for a tool for art making. I fold into erased histories as I run technical training for underrepresented members in the community for the past 15 years, each new move of my family, a new training, another explanation of my importance in existing in the trade as a technician and an artist.
Traditionally matrilineal practices that we know are a part of the creation of technology are integral to pass on. I think of “Algebraic Expressions in Handwoven Textiles” by Ada Dietz in 1949, which she began working on in Banff, AB who wanted physical representations of the math she was interested in through making weaving and baskets. And circuit board maternal weavers of Shiprock, NM creating the basis of early NASA Apollo missions and computational works celebrated in the recent show “Radical Software: Women, Art & Computing 1960–1991” such as the works of Charlotte Johannesson, Beryl Korot, and Rosemarie Trockel reflecting upon the computer’s relationship to the industrial textile loom and the connection between computer software and the soft-wares, i.e. the commodities (textiles) manufactured on the loom. My Video Quilt and it’s Quilting Bee joining these traditions of technology, science, and arts crafted by women, or in my base a non-binary femme.
My Nanny – who’s patterns were the initial inspiration for this project – wanted so much to pass on our family traditions and when I sat down to learn to quilt, my neurodivergence set-off and confused, I became incredibly overwhelmed, however when I sit at a computer or work with light, video or sound, I see an easy path. Our crafts (her’s in drafting technical schemas for WWII bombs, carpentry and later, every kind of knitting a person could image > PENGUINS FACING BACK AND FRONT ON THE BACK AND FRONT OF SWEATERS) and me with my video and film work are different but similar in our need for creation and practicality. Hers for warm, frugalism and fashion, mine for community building, survival and contemporary arts. Same same. We are/were both so technical, so natural; let us teach our daughters and gender expansive future generations, our friends, our community how we are all little pieces that fit together, our fabric made of memories, made for love.