About the Exhibition

We Mend in End Times is a textile-centered exhibit featuring the work of six artists. The works selected for this exhibit reflect the ways we care for our bodies, our community, and our world through the literal mending required of textile work. Mending is the act of stitching together damaged fabric, whether that’s adding a patch to the knee of worn jeans or fixing a hole in an old sweater. Mending is as old a practice as textiles themselves. To mend, one must slow down and look carefully. The mending might utilize invisible stitches or may embrace techniques that create a new, exaggerated beauty. Mending is an act of endurance–when one chooses to mend, a declaration is made that an item is worth saving, fixing, and loving, despite imperfection. 

A common thread throughout the exhibition is the connection to the body, emphasizing the deeply personal relationship textiles have in our lives. Milan Warner utilizes fabric and wigs as facsimiles of the body, slumped or suspended in precious vulnerability. Lucas J Rougeux, embroiders and beads with life-saving gauze, emphasizing the effects of state-sanctioned violence and the intimate collaborative work needed to heal. Communal healing and collective action are featured directly in Izy Carney’s multimedia stop-motion quilt work. The multi-faceted and layered experiences of memory, personal history, the body in nature, space, and time are blended together in Eliza Clifford’s screen printed textiles. Fatima Janneh emphasizes the intimate connection between the delicate body and nature through foraging and processing natural dyes. The body is also a vessel for play, experimentation, and performance through Grace David’s experimental works; tearing and re-pinning denim, the fabric of America, into a wholly new form, or portal.

Each artist utilizes their craft to reflect upon how our bodies have suffered, consoled, and celebrated during volatile times. Visitors are asked to ponder how we mend ourselves, others, and a world that feels unfixable.

In addition to the displayed work, the artists have all provided scrap fabric from their studios for an interactive embroidery and visible mending table. Patrons are invited to learn methods of mending and embroidery for a new collective work; insisting on slowing down, meditating within an intimate collaborative process. The final piece will be raffled to exhibition visitors with a $5 donation to a DC mutual aid organization.

This country is vastly diverse but fraying – with widening holes, tears, and separations that seek to divide us. We Mend in End Times reminds us that the process of repair through mending is a slow and painstaking task made easier together. Damage cannot be undone, but the accumulation of many stitches makes a new and stronger quilt.