Pelican Quilts

My name is Sarah Gagnon and I live in Madison, Wisconsin. Each of my quilts is based on a traditional design or methods, but is my own composition. My process is slow - I create my own colors on linen with natural dyes, then hand stitch them together with sashiko thread.

It’s an exciting time for writing about craft and quilts. It’s become a lot more than just “how-tos.” There are great books and blogs about the sustainability conscious approach to the craft, social justice histories, and quilting as self care. In my writing I focus on bringing together my interest in what it means to be human, with a specific emphasis on psychoanalysis with quilting. I call this writing project, a Psychoanalysis of Quilts - or - The Quilt on the Couch. I want to know why we quilt, what the craft says about us, and what we can learn from quilts about our humanity. The freedom I seek is both person and political.

I am inspired by Freud and his successor, the psychoanalyst and thinker, Jacques Lacan. Lacan used the term the Quilting Point to express how words can operate like stitches. They hold us together into a cohesive whole but they can also be reworked to bring incredible change to our lives and to a quilt. New stitches can function like a new word - it can bring about material changes. I read psychoanalytic theory and enjoy weaving these ideas across technical examinations of quilts (the how-to), quilters, and the place of these traditions within society.

My work as a quilter is an opening for me to think about my life, my body, sexuality, the environment, race, class, life, and death. It’s all in here. Don’t worry, I stay away from jargon and make it all about the quilt. I am obsessed with every aspect of the craft of the quilt.