Mending Our Carrier Bags

Artist Catherine Reinhart travels textiles around the world for <a href="https://www.collectivemendingsessions.com/about-the-project" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">Collective Mending Sessions</a>. She began the project in 2018 when she realized she would need help repairing a beloved quilt from her teenage years. I attend a mending session at Charlotte Street Kemper Library this summer where three patchwork quilts in various states of repair were sprawled across 6 yards of banquet-style tables for participants to converge upon. At the start of the session, after we familiarize ourselves with the fabric nearest to where we’ve sat, Reinhart asks us to move freely about the perimeter in silence for 10 minutes, noticing. “You may get bored,” she warns. But the quilts are enthralling, still functional, despite their unraveling, and renewed by their time enshrouded in collectives. Their thinning, worn fabric is enlivened by anonymous acts of information—myriad motions that reconnect, fortify, and adorn the textile. A modest color pallet of woven and winding thread entices us to touch the surface, which sparks curiosity about how the quilts became and who helped them become. It was exciting to imagine how we, in that particular circle, might respond and add to the mending. When we return to our places, Reinhart guides us to close our eyes and touch the area around us. I feel the soft, ruptured fabric, lumped and pilled, the knots in the threads and frayed edges, the warmth emanating from the nearness of my neighbors’ hands — the stitches somehow feel warm, too. From the friction of our fingers? the residue of the last person’s sewing? This concluded the lesson. Not a formal tutorial on exactly how or what to do, but an invitation to sense and experiment. As we set to darning, stitching, and patching, Reinhart reads aloud Mary Oliver poems, we chat amongst ourselves, and consider the project’s three driving questions: “What is the value of repair, practically and metaphorically?” “How do we mend our communities?” “What is the role of grief in mending?” <a href="https://medium.com/@Atakpa/mending-our-carrier-bags-fed3f4324945">Website</a>