deconstructed quilt | Finch's Creative Endeavors

Over the past year, I’ve been exploring my feelings and memories and thoughts about my adoption. And with the support of my therapist and adoptee support group, I have created something that really encompasses this nebulous, complex…. experience I’ve had.

This is my attempt at telling, creating, authoring part of my story, and trying to communicate what it’s felt like to have this story and move into writing it myself.

I bought white fabric, dyed it with tea, and then painted it. Created the colors and used scissors and my hands to create the shape.

I took already made fabric and pulled it apart into bundles of thread and pieces with holes and frayed edges.

I incorporated the business card from the orphanage I spent time at, and little baby shoes I found in my parent’s basement. And some tea wrappers, as drinking tea is one of the ways I’m engaging with my heritage right now.

I created a landscape based on research from Google Earth of the surrounding hills and the city I was found in using this imprecise, bits-and-pieces applique.

I wanted to stop here. I had a piece I liked looking at, and it was what I had imagined. But it wasn’t the story I want to tell, the whole story, the true story. So I made it messy and complicated and disjointed, like adoption is, how adoption feels. To be cut off from the first person you ever met and knew, who grew you, to be separated from people who look like you, who you heard while you were waiting to be born. To have an origin story you can’t remember and can’t ever know. To be out of context, displaced… Displaced to somewhere nice, with good people, but to always be a branch grafted onto the family tree.

And so I covered it with black bits of fabric, obscuring it.

And cut it up and fit it together in the wrong places and stitched it together again.

And undid stitches and pulled pieces of fabric up and cut into it.

And covered it with ripped pieces of mesh tulle, covering it in more haze.

And, finally, fit the pieces of a poem I amalgamated from my bits of writing about adoption into the shredded edges. It doesn’t feel like closure, but I did need to express it. It was so strange to make a quilt that is not a grid and angles and 1/4″ seams. In the beginning it was daunting, and I instinctively tried to make it pretty, but that’s not what I feel and not what I wanted it to be.

Feel free to take a listen to the poem while you look.