Improv Quilting and Nature's Sustaining Gestures

This summer I had the opportunity to teach a new improv quilting workshop where we explored the gestures of nature that speak to and nourish our internal emotional and spiritual landscapes. Internal and external merge in a meditative process through which we become collaborators, translators and transmitters of the patterns of nature.

Writer Terry Tempest Williams considers the ceaseless dynamic interaction between our interiority and our physical surrounding, which gets to the core practice of the workshop and the improv process of abstraction through the lens of speaking truth:

To be situated in place is to be engaged in a reciprocity where survival, both physical and spiritual, depends on our understanding of gestures. I believe necessity drives us to improvisation where improbable and sustaining gestures create moments of grace that take care of us. We continue to evolve and transform who we are in relationship to where we are. We do not live in isolation from the physical world around us.

The practice we engaged in during the class began with extra time in the mornings to become centered and present in a natural setting. We then made field notes on their surroundings, documenting their rhythms of attention. Our notes could include contour drawings of shape, noting colors including undertones and highlights, translating sounds or movement into marks. I gave the class a series of meditation prompts to guide their observations.

We returned to the studio with the field notes and began to translate our notes into patchwork. The goal was not to be literal but to transmit the nurturing gestures of nature through abstraction.

It was deeply restorative to acknowledge and incorporate the beauty of Madeline Island into the sewing studio, and the improv quilt making process. By pausing and noting our responses to the natural environment, our interior relationship to our exterior environment emerged in authentic ways as we improvised the patchwork. As Terry Tempest Williams continues to put it so well…

Nature beckons our response. It is in the doing, the being, the becoming that meaning is made. What becomes sacred is the act itself — not what remains. Something inexplicable is set into motion. Our fate, like the fate of all species, is determined by chance, by circumstance, and by grace.

As artists and quilt makers we have the ability to witness and transmit our experience of those restorative gestures of grace to others through our patchwork and the community we make together. We follow our own patterns —the patterns we are open to receiving and honoring.