Remnants

Emily Yurkevicz

Area: Fibers

Thesis Statement

"Remnants" is a reclamation of silence, a testament to duality and the inherent untrustworthiness of recollection. In this work, I am tapping into the implicit generational knowledge of storytelling through the muscle memory of making a quilt and encapsulating the labor within layers of cloth. Through the appropriation of quotidian objects into porcelain, I quantify the immaterial and reassert the value of what is often overlooked. The potential for chaos, the lighting of a fire, is mitigated by the grid. You cannot have chaos without order, you cannot have silence without noise; you cannot have life without death.

Silence as a consuming, self-sustaining force, is not an absence, but instead a presence; silence can be personified. Abstracted emotions and corrupted personal memories are presented within the context of the gallery as a place of secular contemplation and reflection. I work with materials along the spectrum of hard and soft; the dichotomy of my childhood, and one of the foundational constructed binaries of society which shaped my formative experiences and early material explorations. Softness here is maternal; my mother steadfast in her never-ending endeavor to provide care, comfort, stability and support. I was introduced to and trained in the fundamentals of house construction on job sites with my father; rigid, unmoving, absent. Dozens of homes across New England can be traced to my father and grandfather, monuments to memory in their own right.

The quiet labor of caregiving is traced through every stitch of a quilt; a low hum as pressure builds through societal expectations. Through the installation of this work, I also form the spaces between – I craft an intentional place for quiet mourning of who we once were, or who we might have been, and voices not remembered within the seemingly inconsequential and forgotten experience of the binding of a quilt or the lighting of a match.