How do we MEND our communities? 🪡🧵
Catherine Reinhart & the Collective Mending Sessions
Something a little different today. I’m interviewing artist Catherine Reinhart about the Collective Mending Sessions. Enjoy!
What's your mending origin story? Did you or someone special to you sew or mend when you were little?
Actually, my mending origin story starts in 2017. My mom handed me a tattered quilt top. It was a damaged quilt that was originally mine from my teenage years. I used and abused it. The quilt was almost in ribbons. When I moved away to college, she asked if I wanted to take it. I said, “No, you can just get rid of it.”
She, being wiser than I kept it.
Fast forward 20 years and she handed it back to me.
I knew I needed to repair it.
I began teaching myself how to mend. While I did have years of hand skills in garment construction and hand embroidery, I had never learned to mend. I didn’t even know how to darn a sock! So I set out to teach myself through books and tutorials. Through this, the resource library for The Collective Mending Sessions was established.
Quickly I realized that this huge (for art standards) quilt measuring 7 by 9 feet was too much for me to do by myself. It was also strangely imbued with the emotional weight of my teenage years; angst, shifting beliefs, independence, and identity conflicts.
I could not be alone with that quilt.
So, The Collective Mending Sessions was born. I invited friends and strangers in my community to stitch alongside one another, lending our collective stitches to these abandoned quilts and asking, “How do we MEND our communities?”
How did mending become part of your creative practice?
As always, it started with an object. A damaged quilt, which demanded to be repaired.
Interestingly, in the rest of my studio practice, I am continually taking textiles apart not repairing them. Transforming them, indeed, into contemporary fiber artworks but always with a compulsion towards disassembly.
However, repair is always a process of doing and undoing. A process of fighting off the inevitable decay. I find that process to be full of tenuous hope.
What are your tips for someone who wants to start mending and doesn't know where to start?
Start with something you don’t care about. Small stakes.
Mend with a friend who knows how to sew.
Check out the many books in my Resource Library, especially this one and this one.
First, cultivate looking. The first step to repair is to notice the damage. Slow down.
When you find something thinning or in need of repair, set it aside. Start a mending pile.
Next, set aside one hour per week (or month) to attend to your mending pile.
Put it on your calendar.
Make it a relaxing, unpressured ritual.
It will take focus, patience, and problem-solving. Make space for those difficult things.
Ask for help.
Tell us about your artist residency in Ireland! What will you be making? How will you be involving the community?
I am thrilled to be chosen for a 3-month residency at Uillian: West Cork Arts Centre in Skibbereen, Ireland from September 20 - Dec 20, 2023. My whole family will be going. We will be staying with my sister and her family. The kids will even get to go to the Irish village school with their cousins!
During my three month residency, I will produce new works in my Topography of Dwelling series and engage the visitors to Uillinn and the community at large by hosting The Collective Mending Sessions (CMS). CMS is a series of workshops that cultivate care for cloth and community through the meditative practice of slow stitching. During these workshops, visitors are invited to repair an abandoned quilt together as Catherine teaches basic mending and facilitates discussion. These workshops will be held in October and November.
Additionally, I plan to do extensive interdisciplinary experimentation into new fiber works, sculptural works, and works on paper. Building on my current body of work, Topography of Dwelling, these works will consider themes of home, labor, and loss in juxtaposition with the architectural, the industrial, and the archaeological. I will reflect on my maternal experience, mapping, and familial relationships. My inquiry is propelled by the question: How can I, as an artist, borrow methods from anthropology to map and archive domestic spaces?
How can we help make this magic happen?!
Give a tax-deductible donation to support taking CMS to Ireland!
While I get to enjoy a fantastic private studio and support to interact with the community, the residency does not provide a stipend or travel support.
My goal is to raise $10,000 to support travel expenses, art materials, my artist stipend, and administrative and shipping costs related to mailing the campaign rewards.
The campaign runs May 1 - 31, 2023.
Real Talk: $10,000 is the most I have tried to raise. EVER. Frankly, it is pretty intimidating.
That is why I need your help to make this magic happen! A friend of mine commented recently on how hard it is for artist mothers to make things happen to accept an award. How we MOVE MOUNTAINS to make our art exist!
Really, we always have help. Moving mountains takes villages full of other movers and inch by inch we accomplish the insurmountable.
Where can we follow you online?
Please consider joining me on my adventures.
Links | The Collective Mending Sessions
www.collectivemendingsessions.com
IG: @collectivemendingsessions
FB: https://www.facebook.com/collectivemendingsessions
Links | Studio Practice
IG: @catherine_reinhart_studio
FB:https://www.facebook.com/c.r.studioCatherineReinhart
BIO
Catherine Reinhart is an interdisciplinary artist based in Iowa. Reinhart creates fiber work and conducts social practice with abandoned textiles around themes of domestic labor, connection, and care. She received her BFA in Integrated Studio Arts in 2008 from Iowa State University. In 2012, she completed her MFA in Textiles from the University of Kansas. Her works have been exhibited locally, regionally, and nationally. She is the recipient of numerous local, state, and national grants. Reinhart was honored as a 2020 Iowa Artist Fellow, an Artist-in-Residence at Terrain Residency (2021), a recipient of the Alex Brown Foundation’s Residency (2022), and an Artist-in-Residence at the West Cork Arts Center in Ireland (2023).
Thank you so much for interviewing her and sharing her work. I'm so compelled by the way that an impulse to mend takes on a collective meaning.