Christine Meuris

“… we were home, we had drawn the circle, we were safe for the night.”
-Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

A friend once asked me whether artists wrote their statements after they made their work. Did they “make up” the meaning of their work? I answered, “of course! At least I do.”
The first piece I made for this show, Fading Star, came from wondering whether a quilt pattern would read if I defined only the negative space on translucent fabric. The idea came from a quilt I was sitting under in the fall of 2023.
And when I was sitting under that quilt, I know I was also thinking about how I had recently lost my mother to cancer and one of my dearest friends in an accident within one week. And between these two events, a war had broken out – and I was no longer drinking to cope with any of it.
Over the months, as I worked on iterations of the quilt pattern idea, I was reclaiming a greater capacity for coping with these tragedies, personal and global. What bloomed in the place of nightly drinks, was a fierce love of returning to the safety of home at the end of the day – the drawing of the circle, as Joan Didion put it – even while knowing how quickly it could all be lost. Love it while you’ve got it.
So the meaning of this show was not clear to me when I started. But now I see that I’ve made a series of tenuous “quilts” and a series of pieces referencing crewel work, which have emerged as symbols of home and hearth, beautiful and sweet even if potentially fleeting.