Brittney Denham Whisonant | The Arrivals

bluebirds fly, wednesday

Hand quilted and dyed indigo, cyanotype, dishtowel

15 x 15 inches

2024

Brittney Denham Whisonant

the arrivals

What motivates my artistic practice is investigation of tradition, scientific practice, and the physical act of laborious processes. My work is deeply rooted in personal narrative, while tangentially being woven into a collective experience. For the past four years, and into the foreseeable future I am exploring the complexities of motherhood identity, body as environment, domestic labor, traditions/history of women’s work, and the dissections of maternal material.

In my practice I intentionally employ techniques and textiles that lend themselves to layered conversations of the maternal. When dyeing fabric, I go through the process of creating an indigo vat by first making what is called a Mother. Madder root, onion skins, avocado pits, and cutch are boiled to create flesh-like tones that bare resemblance to a newborn’s body. I use passed-down textiles like gifted tea towels, my wedding veil, or fabric from my hospital gown when I experienced fertility loss, or birth. I utilize the alternative photographic process of cyanotypes, historically created to capture flora and fauna data, produce copies, and later blueprints. I use these to reference the beginning of my own child’s life, a human coming from someone else, a copy of the original. These techniques are an act of caregiving, an act of labor.

By nature, quilts are first seen through the lens of a domestic object, one for comfort, for cover, for warmth. After treating and collecting textiles, I piece them together to create compositions referencing the body, a calendar of months pregnant, children lost, fertility windows, feeding schedules, and childlike icons of houses or homes that have the scale of a mother carrying a child, or a pregnant belly. The quilts range from historical half-square piecing that represents stability, strength, and tradition, to spray-painted improvisational works that look fractured and out of control, mimicking the spectrum of caregiving. Finally, the pieces are hand quilted to replicate the physicality, labor, and imperfection that is motherhood.

—Brittney Denham Whisonant