If the machinery goes, we will repair it

Wally Dion, born 1976, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.

Fabric Star Quilts.

Wally (Walter) Dion is a Canadian artist of Saulteaux ancestry living and working in Upstate New York. Working in a number of media including painting, drawing and sculpture.

Wally explains:

"The first fabric star quilt was made as part of a 2022 residency at Wanuskewin Park. It was my way of reflecting upon prairie tall grass and the reintroduction of bison into the Great Plaines. I wanted to make several transparent quilts and superimpose them; one in front another... a quilt for the microbiome, another for the bison, their manure & hooves, another for the summer fires that scorch the ground and a final quilt for the sweetgrass braid.

I was considering how all of these things worked together for thousands of years to create what is known as the 'prairie tall grass ecosystem'. A vast and fertile expanse of land stretching from the foothills of Alberta to the banks of the Mississippi. I wanted to highlight the invisibility of systems when everything is working well, as it should be.

I started with the green quilt because it is the colour of the sweet grass braid that is exchanged in ceremony and relationship building. I considered the nature and tradition of quilting; impoverished craftspeople using tiny scraps of fabric. I considered the act of offering fabric and adherence to tradition. I thought of a thousand tiny prayers and how that might look; invisible acts of respect and adherence to protocols spanning decades. My thoughts travelled across the land, imagining the trees and rocks collecting these prayers like a bush of cloth, or an etched boulders."

But because I knew nothing about weaving, everything had to be explained to me, down to the most basic tacit knowledge: things that an eight-year-old girl in 1828 would have known, because when she was not winding yarn around a quill to help her mother, she was working on the family’s loom herself...

For my textile, weaving, historic textile, history enthusiasts

SR: Their expertise as makers has clued me into historical experiences most scholars have glossed right over. A 1930s Federal Writers Project interview with a formerly enslaved octogenarian might reference a grandmother’s sewing prowess, but then a student will say, No, you can’t just skim over by that! Do you know how many hand stitches it takes to do the seam of a dress? If you’ve never handsewn a skirt (and I haven’t), you might need to be reminded of the labor involved. One student reproduced a 19th-century skirt as her final project, and it was all about the stitches. Their reading of primary sources picked up on things that I missed.

Yum Yum

Ahmed Sobhi