The art quilt “COVID Reset” was featured in the ArtOut exhibit “Queering the Pandemic” in the Gulfport, Florida Public Library for Pride Month June 1-30, 2022.
“COVID Reset” art quilt, Susan Maughlin Wood, 2022
COVID is a society-wide low tide that exposed our inequalities like nothing before, with truths no longer deniable about how our systems truly were designed to function for the powerful and malfunction for the marginalized. The world ends again and again in waves of political upheaval.
In the early days of the pandemic I adapted online mask patterns and sewed over 300 reversible, filter-ready cloth masks for friends/family and a local Crafters Against COVID-19 group. The Covid Reset quilt was born of a need to step back during a “breather” and attempt to process the magnitude of what the world had suffered and continues to suffer from a maddeningly ill-managed pandemic.
A corona(virus) of cloth masks in various stages of completion asks the perpetually unanswered question: is it RISING, or is it SETTING? The moon hangs next to it, a pseudo-magical orb of hopeful vaccination, spiky on the inside but absent the teeth to truly eradicate the virus in the face of maddening skepticism surrounding the vaccine and masking. An Asian print of ocean waves in the bottom right corner laments xenophobic scapegoating, while a faint tropical print in the upper right suggests unattainable escape. Crude rectangular hospital-white clouds are enlarged versions of casings for nose wires inside the cloth masks; grey clouds are perennial wildfire smoke, angrily outlined in a flat version of cloth masks helpless against an unrelated, but all-too-predictable, climatic onslaught. The oddly-shaped tree line is an effort to efficiently use leftover scraps as-is from mask templates, while puffily gathered fabric hills evoke rising bread dough to celebrate newly developed pandemic-era survival skills. The floating triangle under a reflective surface embodies unseen and, for both good and ill, unlearned systems–that is, we struggle to unlearn our various intersectional bigotries as we inadvertently also unlearn or forget the shared factors that could unite us against humanity’s darkest tendencies toward conquest, division and destruction.
Humanity has been given a reset button in this self-aware period of history. Are we going to fall to fascism again or can we rise up en masse to make real the ideals of equality we claim to embody?