• Issue #1 ◊ summer 2008 ◊ Submit an article

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Quilting from the Soul: Living in the Intersection of Art and Spirituality

June Mears Driedger

I learned to sew in elementary school, taught by my grandmother and great-grandmother. My motivation was to make clothes for my Barbie doll--I didn't know at the time that sewing for Barbie is a near-impossible task. I guessed it was difficult when I heard my great-grandmother swear for the first and last time while trying to turn the sleeve of my Barbie dress.

I began to sew in earnest in junior high and high school, making clothes for myself. At the time, my family attended a large evangelical church where the norm for the young women was to wear a different outfit to youth group on Sunday night than what we wore to church that morning. It wasn't unusual for me to get home Sunday afternoon and race against both the clock and sewing machine to make a new wrap-around skirt for youth group that night.

I began quilting while I lived in Goshen, Indiana and was surrounded by hand-quilters and MCC relief sales. One of the administrative assistants at the church where I worked was (and is) an enthusiastic quilter--piecing and quilting by hand--and she encouraged me to learn to quilt. I began taking classes at the local quilt store, asked lots of questions at the Mennonite Women gatherings as the older women sat around the quilting frames and hand-quilted. I began to make quilts--wall hangings, bed quilts, etc.

I moved to Lansing, Michigan, where the largest quilt store in Michigan is located. I continued taking classes, joined the local quilt guild, and participated in a small quilt group. I discovered that quilting is not alone in binding together the sacred and the quotidian. "Like other disciplines or practices or artistic expression, quilting is rich in both symbolism and traditions."¹

In 2003 I attended the biannual Sacred Threads exhibit in Columbus, Ohio, an outgrowth from the book, With Sacred Threads: Quilting and the Spiritual Life. As I wandered around the exhibit, my soul, my spirit, began leaping with joy and I thought, "This is the kind of quilting what I want to do. I want to create art quilts that express my soul." It was an enormous shift both internally and externally as I thought and viewed these "sacred thread" quilts. It was permission to play with fiber while pondering God. As I half-facetiously shared in worship the following Sunday, "I spent the weekend thinking about God and quilts--what more could I want?"

At this exhibit I met three women from Grand Rapids, Michigan and felt an immediate kinship with them, particularly Beth Ann Williams, a professional quilter and quilt teacher. Several months after meeting Beth Ann, I worked up the courage to ask her to mentor me in art quilts. This relationship has flourished into a deep friendship as well as a retreat partnership--twice annually we lead "Storytelling in Fabric" retreats where we integrate fiber art and faith for the weekend.

I write as an artistic autodidact. While I have participated in scores of quilting classes, have taken seminary classes on Christianity and the Arts, I am not a trained artist. Yet, I consider my fiber art as an essential part of my life journey. It is more than a hobby or a craft, it is an expression of my soul--an expression of prayer, worship, transformation.

Art from the Soul

Art from the soul² transforms me. It is a way for me to think about God and to explore God's movement in my life and in the world around me.

Christine Valters Paintner believes that creativity and spiritual "are intimately linked." She writes:

Both reveal the unutterable, the invisible, the transcendent. Art invites engagement, interaction; it makes space for encounter with God. ...Spirituality is about this longing for God, for a connection to the mystery dimension of life, the ultimacy that fills our world with meaning.³

Art from the soul connects me to the Divine Creator. The process of art-making, of expressing my creativity, leads me into mystery and closer to the Mysterious One. As Karla Kincannon writes:

Just as the pilgrim-seeker opens to a larger reality in a spiritual encounter, so too the artist opens to something beyond herself or himself in a creative encounter....That something is the very creative energy of God.⁴

Art from the soul allows me to glimpse at the face of God. The process of creating opens me to new reflection, new contemplation of God. Because I want to plan and control the details of my life, creating causes me--indeed, it forces me--to loosen my grip, to live in unknowing, to not force a result. This living in unknowing becomes a deep listening, a deep seeing, similar to prayer. In fact, my spiritual director suggests it is prayer, a living prayer as I begin to see God's presence and activity around me. I glimpse the holy, sacred spaces in life. "When we open ourselves to the intrinsic value of art--in its vast array of styles and techniques--we open ourselves to being met by the Holy One who speaks in unexpected ways."⁵

Additionally, as described in With Sacred Threads:

Linking art, imagination, and spiritual growth is not new. Icons, hymns, sculptures, painting, weavings, beadwork, carvings--and many other forms of artistic expression--have long been valued for their ability to take us into the Holy; to reveal some deeper knowledge of ourselves or our God.⁶

God, through art from the soul, is transforming my voice and making me into a co-creator.

Finding My Voice

Soon after attending the Sacred Threads exhibit, an image came to me (during a worship service, no less!) that I continue to use and to ponder. The initial meaning of the image is about power, as in empowerment and agency. I drew and colored the image several times during the ensuing weeks and tried to figure out how to create this image in a quilt. At this point I began meeting with Beth Ann, who acted as my "quilting mid-wife" as I slowly began to birth this image. The quilt "Finding My Voice" (photo 1) took me more than two years to make--not because of the complexity of the technique but because of my own inner work. As spiritual directors say, I needed to "sit with the image" while quilters say, I needed to let the "quilt speak to me." I had to ponder and wait and pray as I looked at the half-finished quilt tacked to my design wall. Eventually I came to understand that the image, and the quilt itself, it was more than just power, per se. It was about my tentative steps toward becoming an art quilter. It was about my voice as a woman. I wrote this reflection for my artist statement:

Women struggle to find and to claim their own voices. This quilt reflects my process of finding my authentic voice while trying to move beyond the boxes. When I first designed this quilt, I though the colors bursting from the white space represented my voice. While the colors moved subtly and prettily, this wasn't quite my authentic voice. I was still stick in boxes.

My authentic voice--my story--is expressed in the appliqué spiral that moves beyond the squares. It represents my voice moving outside of the box. I chose the chakra energy colors for creativity (orange) and for voice (blue) and I understood that my spiral needed to combine these two colors as a symbol of finding my voice.

In this creative process I realized that finding my voice was the direction God was calling me. Kincannon describes this process as finding one's true self: "Creativity is honest. It comes from a place deep within that does not know how to be deceptive. By participating in the creative process, a pathway forms to inner wisdom, leading insights about the nature of our true self. One layer at a time, the creative process gently peels back the camouflage that has accumulated over years of living... When artists experience an encounter in the creative process, a glimpse of the true self accompanies it."⁷

Another quilt emerged after my hysterectomy, "Shame" (photo 4). I had this surgery after years of heavy bleeding and cramps during my monthly periods. During those years I felt intense shame over the extent of my bleeding--a shame I rarely discussed. As I recovered from surgery, I decided to create a quilt that illustrated my experience and I painted a scrap of muslin in deep reds. My artist statement for this quilt:

Women's stories involve women's bodies. Women are deeply ambivalent about their bodies, including their monthly periods.

I painted and stitched my quilt shortly after my hysterectomy. The shame I am expressing is from decades of painful, messy periods. The lack of a quilt binding reflects the menstrual rags used by women before me.

The creation of this quilt brought healing for me as I named my shame and opened my heart to God's healing touch. In With Sacred Threads, the authors quote Laurie Bushbaum, a quilt and fabric artist and minister: "Whatever else art may be, it is primarily the work of the soul. For me, art has been the way to find Soul, nurture it, heal it, grow it." ⁸

Through my art-making, I was able to voice my pain and move toward wholeness. Finding my voice frees me to explore themes of suffering, pain and loss in my art quilts. As writer Madeleine L'Engle, in her superb meditation on art and faith, notes: "The artist cannot hold back; it is impossible, because writing, or any other discipline of art, involves participation in suffering, in the ills and the occasional stabbing joys that come from being part of the human drama."⁹

Co-creating vs. Co-laboring

Last spring, at the Storytelling in Fabric retreat, we were discussing the value of quilts and art to a broken world. One participant talked about how we use our quilts in service to God, and I responded vehemently, "I just want to make art. I don't want to think about how this might serve God. I just want to make art." A momentary, awkward silence followed my outburst.

I was startled and troubled by my reaction to the woman's words and my deep resistance to my quilt arts serving God. I perceive myself as a willing co-laborer with God. My deep reaction changed that self-perception, and I feared I was insulting God.

I discussed this with my spiritual director, intent on exploring this apparent shift in my relationship with God. She promptly stopped me: "You're not a co-laborer. You are a co-creator with God."

This changed everything. Valters-Paintner describes co-creating and art-making as "participation in God's creative activity." This is a collaborative relationship, not an employer-employee relationship. She continues:

Every human being bears the image of God; every human being who creates, speaks, sings, writers or sculpts reflects something of the Creator...Every creative act calls forth the presence of God in beautiful colors and sounds and textures... Like the spiritual journey, the creative process is transformation.¹⁰

At the aforementioned retreat we created fabric books--journals, prayer books, memory books. I chose to create a book based on some of the writings of Hildegard of Bingen, an eleventh century abbess and mystic. Hildegard's writings are full of fresh images of God and of herself in relation with God. I focused on four quotes, using a large page for each quote and the book became a kind of prayer book for me as I prayed and mulled over these images that highlighted different glimpses of the nature of God. These quotes are:

*I am but a feather on the breath of God;
*I am the breeze that nurtures all things green. ...I am the rain coming from the dew that causes the grasses to laugh with joy of life. ...I am the yearning for good;
* God says: I am the supreme fire--Not deadly, but rather, enkindling every spark of life;
*The earth of humankind contains all moistness, all verdancy, all germinating power.

I have since taken these quotes and images and created small wall hangings that have become icons for me, leading me into deeper understanding of God (photos 3 and 4). Valters Paintner writes: "Art-making helps us to be present to mystery. We give meaningful expression to our commitments, values, and ideas. We make beauty present. The practices of art empower everyday life."¹¹

When we create art from the soul, we do indeed live in the intersection of creativity and spirituality as we allow God to transform us through our authentic voices and becoming the collaborators with the Divine Creator.

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June Mears Driedger is a writer and aspiring fiber artist, living in Michigan. She is an ordained Mennonite pastor, spiritual director, and retreat leader. She is also managing editor of Leader magazine, a quarterly magazine published by Faith & Life Resources.

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