Sarah FitzSimons is showing her magnificent Pacific Quilt at Hawthorn Contemporary here in Milwaukee. The exhibition is called Ocean Object, and features the enormous textile, in addition to related drawings and smaller sewn works by this Madison-based artist.
The exhibition at Hawthorn is an unusual opportunity to see this work. It flows over the floor, filling up the center space of a fairly large room. Basically a quilted bathometric map, the gallery describes the work as:
Pacific Quilt spans 21 ft x 24 ft with one inch representing 25 miles. In translation from ocean to quilt, varying shades of blue fabric convey underwater topography and sewn quilt lines extend out in organic swirls to describe surface currents.
The quilt can be seen in its entirety, as it is laid out on the gallery floor. It is envisioned by the artist as useable, despite being distinctly non-utilitarian, as it is very big (my museum background sent cascades of red flags: it will get dirty! how could such a large textile be cleaned! would it fit in my car?). Too large to be easily transported, too immense for any bed, and indeed most rooms. What would it be like to be wrapped in such a vast sea?
The Pacific Ocean defined my childhood and my young adulthood. A transplanted Californian, I still retain the (now problematic) habit of assuming that large water indicates a westerly direction. I played in that ocean, looked out over it, turned green with seasickness while out on it, almost drowned in it (saved by an unknown surfer), and have wandered along its wet sand from San Diego to Arcata. I have also sat on one of its beaches and looked east, towards a very distant home, marveling at the circuit my life had made, from conception to adulthood, across that expanse of water.
Maybe due to the recent disruption of moving to a new job and a new city, I wanted to locate something of me, of my experience, in this blue expanse on the gallery floor. I found myself walking around the Pacific Quilt looking for familiar spots–San Francisco Bay and Baja California—which are geographically distinct and turn out to be identifiable even at this scale. I walked around the entire blue, undulating ocean, from the Arctic, along Asia, to the Antarctic and up along the Americas. And on a quilted map of the Pacific floor, on the floor of a gallery in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, I was able to find something known, a small connection to home, a confirmation of myself.
Vast, unimaginable, powerful, beautiful. Bathometry to bedroom, ocean floor on gallery floor. Traveling the circumference of the Pacific Rim, gazing over the depths and islands, bays and continents. Imagine wrapping yourself in the ocean blue. Pacific Quilt is on view from June 8 – August 23, 2019 at Hawthorn Contemporary in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
Ann Sinfield: Projects 