New redwork installation stitches provoking stories of war and injustice

From far away you could mistake Catherine Heard's newest art installation for a large quilt, something cozy you might wrap around you in your grandmother's house, with red stitching carefully etched on to each of the dozens of pretty patches.

Up close though — the quilt stitches a much different story. 

The redwork quilt is embroidered with images of war over the decades and the injustices faced through gruesome circumstances.

"For me, art is about putting questions out there so with a piece like this I am not trying to provide an answer, I am provoking people to think about what it means," said Heard, an assistant professor in the visual art program at the University of Windsor.

The project features new patches sent by people from around the world stitched alongside historical textiles from the mid-1800's that Heard has collected.

"I think one of the ways this piece functions is that it plays back and forth between home and history where in our homes we want to have these home-like images … but these histories invade our homes," said Heard, standing in front of the work-in-progress installation at the University of Windsor's School of Creative Arts.

"For many years I have been bothered by this feeling of helplessness in the face of injustice and the feeling of history repeating itself … How do we deal with this problem?"

Some of the patches can be somewhat provocative, depicting contentious political events like the decapitation of a Sir John A Macdonald statue in Ottawa or a prisoner being tortured in a jail cell in Abu Ghraib, a Iraq prison where the United States Army committed a series of human rights violations. 

Redwork is a historical style of embroidery or needlework that originated in Europe and the United States in the late 1860's when the first colourfast dyes were developed. 

"Textile arts have a particular connection to activism when we think back for example to the banners that the suffragettes carried or if we think back to the AIDS quilt."

The project is participant driven. More than 400 people have requested an embroidery kit from Heard through her website with participants as far as Japan and Australia adding to the large redwork collection. 

Some of the participants are embroidering for the first time while others with years of experience. Heard said she has no plans to slow down the collection of the patches.

The installation will be shown at the Niagara Artists Centre in St. Catherines on September 29th. 

There are no formal plans to display the work in Windsor.