It's Saturday and I'm sure you have some free time to visit an exhibit named "The Feminine Face of Fiber," which is partially about robots. If you live in the Chicago area, you can see the "Female Cyborg Series," a collection of robot-inspired quilts created by Kathy Weaver, a former teacher and painter. According to this article from Pioneer Press, in Glenview, Illinois, Kathy started to create quilts featuring robots about seven years ago, partially because "she is a longtime collector of '50s sci-fi memorabilia." Admission is free and details are here. As Chicago is far from Paris, France, I doubt I'll see these quilts. But if you happen to see them, please let me know.
Below are two quilts made by Kathy Weaver. You'll find other ones in this gallery of robot quilts.
Here is a quilt named "The Robot Flies Away" (Credit: Kathy Weaver).
And this one carries the title "The Robot Worries" (Credit: Kathy Weaver).
Please read the Pioneer Press article for more details about the artist. Here are selected excerpts about why she started to design quilts featuring robots.
Robots began appearing in Weaver's work about seven years ago.
"I was teaching at the time in an elementary school and we'd been playing around with paper robots," she recalled. Weaver noted that when the children moved the robots' arms and legs even slightly, the paper figures became very animated.
If our web be framed with rotten handles, when our loom is well nigh done, our work is new to begin. God send the weaver true prentices again, and let them be denizens.
—Elizabeth I (1533–1603)
"I started thinking these could really talk to somebody about different emotions," she said.
The robots additionally appealed to Weaver because she is a longtime collector of '50s sci-fi memorabilia.
"And I also see the robot as sort of a hopeful figure. I don't see them as threatening," Weaver said. "My dad was in electronics and always kept up with the latest gadgets. They are definitely part of our future."
The artist doesn't view robots as male-dominated figures, but rather as "a kind of figure that would be parallel to the soothsayer or the shaman."
The exhibit, which started on January 5, 2005, will end on February 13, 2005. This exhibit is open to the public and admission is free. You'll find all the details on this page from the Dittmar Memorial Gallery at the Norris University Center of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. Here is how Kathy Weaver's works are introduced.
Kathy Weaver uses the quilt medium and the robot persona to invite the viewer into a complex and intriguing alter world in her Female Cyborg Series. As a child of the fifties living amidst today's technological modernity, the robot for Weaver represents a potential ranging from an ambiguously "friendly future" to a literal integration of robot into the human body in the form of pacemakers and piecemakers. In seven stunningly handcrafted large-scale works, the viewer is invited into the picture plane to see the modality of the robot's disposition as it reflects the delicious complexity of human nature. The environment of the robot raises important questions about the intersections between technology and nature, between our skinned, armored world and our interior, emotional selves.
As I wrote above, please let me know what you think if you see Weaver's 'robotic' quilts.
It was in fact an old battle and hunting ground through which we had been floating, the ancient dwelling-place of a race of hunters and warriors.... Pawtucket and Wamesit, where the Indians, where the Indians resorted in the fishing season, are now Lowell, the city of spindles and Manchester of America, which sends its cotton cloth round the globe. Even we youthful voyagers had spent a part of our lives in the village of Chelmsford, when the present city, whose bells we heard, was its obscure north district only, and the giant weaver was not yet fairly born. So old are we; so young is it.
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
Sources: Myrna Petlicki, Pioneer Press, Glenview, Illinois, January 6, 2005; and various websites
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