“I considered the nature and tradition of quilting; impoverished craftspeople using tiny scraps of fabric,” Wally Dion says. “I thought of a thousand tiny prayers and how that might look; invisible acts of respect and adherence spanning decades.”
For many rural and economically strapped communities throughout history, quilting was a necessity. Tattered clothing and blankets were cut up and refashioned into new blankets, their patchwork styles evidence of the fabrics’ earlier uses. For Indigenous people, though, quilts “hold a particularly important cultural value,” says artist Wally Dion, “appearing as gifts, ceremonial objects, and celebratory markers.”
In his ongoing Grass Quilts series, Dion stitches translucent textiles into large-scale pieces. He found the initial thread for the body of work in 2008 with an eight-point star made from circuit boards, and he then swapped the upcycled electronics for fabrics during a residency at Wanuskewin Park. The idea was to re-envision the prairie ecosystem and the bison reintroduced to the Great Plains through quilts, which would reveal an eight-point star when displayed together. FOR MORE
