(Our) Baby Blanket reflects the challenge of mourning two people at once. It addresses irreconcilable histories conjoined by loss; the anxiety that one is better mourned than the other; and the inevitability of their juncture, however unharmonious, in the tender and intimate body of the quilt.

For the piece, I recovered a quilt both my father and I had been wrapped in as infants. The hand-made, fifty-year old blanket was badly torn and in a state of disrepair. Treating this shared heirloom as a representation of my paternal history, I sought to articulate my complicated role in his family through an act of corruptive repair. Although the quilt featured a simple design in pale green and soft floral print, I repaired it with bold and sturdy wax cloth, or pagne, inherited from my Congolese Grandmother. In addition to associating the fabric to her and to the African character of my maternal family, I also considered it an autobiographical symbol: like myself, the wax cloth is a global hybrid with a complex colonial lineage. Through the disruptive insertion of this cloth into the original pattern, our blanket was both repaired and not repaired. The pattern was destroyed by my contribution, the new fabrics glaring from the docile green material, and the tattered shreds were still visible beneath my timid stitches.

This piece was installed as part of the Solo Exhibition, “Dissonate,” at FrontierSpace Gallery in Missoula in 2015, and again at the Gallery of Visual Arts in 2016.