Marie Watt
Marie Watt is an artist of Seneca, Scottish, and German ancestry. Her art explores the confluence of myth, history, and memory drawing from ancient and modern stories. In her most recent body of work, she employs the blanket as both material and metaphor. Used as gifts at naming ceremonies and memorials, blankets have a particular set of meanings in the American Indian community making their use as an art material particularly evocative.
Watt conceives of blankets as both wall-related, two-dimensional objects that can be stitched to create tapestry—as in Ballad of Ira Hayes (2008)—or as materials that can be piled on pedestals between floor and ceiling as in Blanket Stories: Three Sisters, Cousin Rose, Four Pelts, and Sky Woman (2005). Ballad of Ira Hayes honors the Pima World War II veteran, placing his face before a symbol of his people—the man in the maze. In the lower right hand corner the viewer can see the portraits of the four other marines and the navy corpsman that raised the United States flag over Mt Suribachi on Iwo Jima with Hayes. The use of army blankets as one of the materials for the piece adds a nuanced meaning.
Blankets can also be slit and sewn into webs to create large three-dimensional objects like her dynamic work, Forget-me-not: Mothers and Sons (2008). In this piece, Watt attaches more than one hundred hand-stitched portraits of young men from Oregon (where she resides) who died serving in the United States military. To each of these portraits, she has attached a handwritten nametag and an image of the soldier’s mother, thus creating a shrine to generational relationships informed by love and loss.
Watt frequently enlists help from the community for her large-scale works. She advertises for people to make sections of her work in sewing circles in return for food that she provides. This practice allows her to complete sizeable works that have detailed stitching in a shorter time span and, importantly, results in a community involvement that helps define the work as a collaborative effort.
When discussing her practice, Watt has written, “My work is about social and cultural histories imbedded in commonplace objects. I consciously draw from indigenous design principles, oral traditions and personal experience to shape the inner logic of the work I make.”[1] Watt’s work has earned numerous awards including the 2009 Bonnie Bronson Fellowship Award, the 2007 Anonymous Was A Woman Award, the 2006 Joan Mitchell Foundation Fellowship and the 2005 Eiteljorg Museum Artist Fellowship. Her work is collected by the Hallie Ford Museum, the Eiteljorg Museum, The Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian and the Seattle Art Museum.
[1] Marie Watt Studio, “Blanket Stories: Graphic Work,” http://mkwatt.com/index.php/content/work_detail/category/blanket_stories_graphic_work