Marie Watt, Blanket Stories: Ancestor, Baron Woolen Mill and Hill People, 2013, wool blankets, steel pole, and cedar base.
According to Marie Watt (Seneca Nation), “I’m interested in how blankets are objects that we take for granted, but that can have extraordinary histories.” By stacking something as familiar as blankets into a towering column, Watt’s work contains many rich layers of meaning:
- Life stories (blankets wrap both infants and the dead)
- Seneca practices of giving blankets “to honor people for standing witness to important life events”
- Indigenous totems in the Pacific Northwest
- Linen closets and other domestic storage spaces
- Utah’s textile history (Baron Woolen Mills)
- Art history (Constantin Brâncuși’s sculpture Endless Column)
Made by Watt in community with many local contributors who sent in blankets and wrote their stories on tags, this work gives striking form to communal practices of creation.
For further reading, see Marie Watt, “In Conversation with Marie Watt: A New Coyote Tale,” Art Journal 76, no. 2 (2017): 124–35.
