Quilting Patterns of Identity III

2019—2024

Bates College Museum of Art

2024

Quilting Patterns fuses floral and geometric patterns taken from quilt designs from Pakistan and the Gilcrease Museum’s collection in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Hanging like banners, they offer tribute to women craft artists across the globe whose identities and memories are preserved in the quilts they create, and by the families who are kept warm by them. Their porousness—the way they change and play with the light—recalls sacred principles recognizing the spiritual within the material.

The title foregrounds multi-layered identities that immigrant women assume within and between cultures. As an immigrant, for me, community and belonging are not static, but a process of continually engaging. In visualizing this process, the patterns I use from human and natural creation expose cosmic interconnectedness between and across cultures. By blending the geometric patterns in the quilt designs, the work creates a symbolic dialogue between women from different cultures and time periods, showing human connections through shared art forms and expressions.