About the Book:

Riptides explores mother and daughters across multiple generations of my family, telling layers of stories of four women as they embrace/reject these critical relationships. Moving from infancy and girlhood to leaving home, and from marriage and motherhood to her own daughter leaving home, each woman struggles in her own time and in her own way with conflicting imperatives to both stay and leave.  I drew from the histories of my great-grandmother, my grandmother, my mother and myself to create the visible and hidden text.  Informing both book and text, metaphors of water, tides and swimming/drowning are a continual thread throughout.

Originally inspired by a family heirloom quilt, the possibility of creating this book had been in the back of my mind for a long time. I wanted the book to also be quilt, and I wanted to utilize the “Ocean Waves” pattern of my family quilt - a design with large diamonds surrounded by smaller ones, the smaller ones placed in rows so that they look like waves approaching/retreating from a shoreline.  Finding a workable form for this was challenging, and I tried many before one finally emerged: a serendipitous combination of a Turkish map fold structure and a meander fold structure that together created a natural repeating pattern of large diamonds, to which I could add the smaller triangle design.   

About the Text:

Construction of the text was a challenge equal to that of the book structure, to find forms and structures and words that were both concise (due to the limited space available for text) and evocative (an appropriate reflection of rich, full lives).  I ultimately included four of the texts that I wrote - indicating relationships, life stories, and deeply-held/deeply denied desires, as well as offering advice to potential rescuers of drowning people – and positioned them to inform and inflect on each other, with some texts being visible and clear and others obscured under translucent layers.

About the Materials and Processes: 

Riptides combines meander fold and Turkish map fold structures, and was created using four base panels of navy blue heavy-weight paper joined together with handmade bias tape to form a continuous structure.  Small triangles of kozo paper are dry-mounted to each base panel; large vellum squares are also dry mounted to each base panel as well as stitched on along the Turkish map fold lines with embroidery thread.  Vintage garments are used for the small triangles that are dry-mounted atop the large vellum squares; the center spiral design is also stitched with embroidery thread.  All papers and fabrics are mounted using BufferMount.  The fonts used are VinerHand and Abadi MT Pro; the text was digitally typeset, laser printed and transferred to paper, vellum and fabric surfaces using a xylene solvent.

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