WEEK NINE

9A: SUMMARY

Untitled Quilt (PC: Madison D.)

Grace McLarty (she/her) is a mixed-media and fiber artist who has been exploring the themes if addiction, trauma, sexual abuse, queerness, and intersectional feminism since 2014. Inspired by the strength and wisdom of grandmothers and all others before her who have practiced crafts that could be considered “women’s work”, she has been focusing on the art of quilting during COVID in an effort to create a soft and gentle space, both physically and emotionally. Her current quilt focuses on examining her own European heritage in an attempt to better understand her place in the world as well as address racism, classism, and sexism in her familial history and in her personal life in order to start the process of grieving, healing, and creating a more socially just world. In this same piece, she confronts issues such as the housing crisis in Olympia, alternative housing solutions, and the meaning of hearth and home as well as coming to terms with coming out as queer, abuse and trauma, and drug and alcohol addiction. Improvisational yet intentional, her work aims to weave together a collectively traumatic history, a healing and meditative present, and a radically different future.