Heather Kerley

This gesture is an open-ended process of offering prayers for healing the land scarred by centuries of exploitation, colonialism, and environmental degradation. Echoing the tradition of Tibetan prayer flags, I have hand-stitched these pieces and hung them outside in the elements to be integrated into my accompanying project to re-wild my yard and make it a home for native plants and wildlife to thrive.

After my little banner hung in the elements all winter in 2023, I took it apart and added other found elements in the process to derive new “personalities.” These then continued to commune with each other and the elements, hanging from the crabapple tree outside my studio window. Among the elements incorporated here are fabrics dyed with plants from the yard, an embroidery of a tobacco plant that spent time buried in the soil, a rust-dyed cheese cloth, scraps of thread and old buttons, parts of a flour-sack, and vintage fabric.

Time, the elements, and my own interventions have affected the different parts in various ways. After being in the elements for so many months, there are new patterns and colors- constellations of mildew, uneven faded dyes, and dirt, along with all the unseen microbes and molecules present in the ecosystem that are now woven into these fragments.

Now I am hoping to bring this year-long project to a conclusion, beginning to reconfigure them into something less ephemeral. I am trying to listen rather than impose and to allow the relationships to speak for themselves.

My latest series of mini-quilts is a love letter to the cycle the human hand has helped along for thousands of years in the practice of saving seeds for next year’s crop.

I’ve collected seeds and nuts from the native plants and trees in my yard and I’m making a quilted “seed bank.” Each miniature quilt in this series has the seeds preserved in a tulle capsule. These pieces speak to regeneration of life and how nothing in nature really ends but continues in an endless cycle.

I’ve also created a banner of small provisional pieces that will be in the yard through the winter as an open-ended gesture of hope and curiosity. I vaguely thought of these as “prayer flags” but I’m more intrigued by how transformed they will be by the sun, rain, snow, and moonlight.