Quilting, colour and compulsion among our famous used clothing bins.
We define the mission we're on using the ancient Sanskrit word sutra, which at one time meant the thread that binds things together. The things we want to bind together are more difficult to define, other than to say we are looking for colours, textures, irregular patterns and hints of stories of the lives of people we will never know. The purpose of this sutra is to create a puzzle. The story begins with a search for the pieces.
The sutra has guided us to a strip-mall parking lot on a Sunday afternoon. The sky is spitting rain and we are eating sandwiches in the car, preparing for an afternoon of speed shopping. The doors to Guy's Frenchy's in Bouctouche, NB, open in five minutes.
"How do you feel? Are you ready?" I ask Jennifer Beckley, my friend and shopping sage.
"I feel great," she replies. "I'm excited. Let's go."
The Bouctouche Frenchy's has the same clean, Spartan decor as others in the chain of used-clothing outlet stores that have become a cultural institution in the Maritimes. White signs with black block letters hang from the ceiling, guiding shoppers to clothes and cloth housewares piled in rectangular plywood bins, while coats, suits and dresses hang on racks against the walls.
Jen picks up a plastic basket and goes to work. Her head of wavy blond hair towers above the other shoppers as she strides down the centre aisle, scanning the bins and the racks. She makes her first move, scooping up a Holly Hobbie bedroom set, circa 1970, which includes sheets, curtains and a comforter, and a fluorescent orange blanket that she saw the moment she walked through the door.
"It doesn't seem possible to make that colour with a dye," she says as she turns the blanket over in her hands. "It's glowing."
She studies the Holly Hobbie bedroom set and orange blanket combination, laying them out across the tops of the bins, then she turns her attention to a bin of men's pants. She has abandoned the Holly Hobbie idea.
"The quilt was already formed in my mind-and then it was tossed to the universe," she says, flashing a smile, her blue eyes filled with the excitement of the hunt. "That could have been a good quilt."
Some of the men's pants are new and others worn, but they all come in conservative browns and greys and blues. "No bin is as subtle as men's pants," she says. "They are all within a narrow range of tonality." She sorts through the bin and fills a basket.
Then Jen turns to the lingerie bin and pulls out a soft, bright pink housecoat. She lays the pants across the bin and arranges the housecoat on top.
"I think I've got it," she says. "I'm finished." She's smiling that big smile again. We ring in the load at the checkout: $47.24, just under her budget of $50 for each store.
We walk back to the car, both slightly out of breath, having completed another leg in the journey that Jen calls her Frenchy's Sutra. She will assemble the fabric in her bag into a quilt, one of 16 quilts she is creating from each of the Guy's Frenchy's outlets in Atlantic Canada. Each quilt begins in this way, with an excursion to a store. This was the tenth store Jen has visited since she began making Frenchy's quilts two years ago.
"It's definitely an adrenaline rush," she says. "You walk in with nothing. You know you will come out with a filled garbage bag, and it's going to be a piece. It's very much split-second decisions."
We leave Bouctouche and drive north to Shediac, where the Frenchy's outlet is packed with shoppers sifting through bins. As soon as we walk through the door Jen picks a houndstooth sports jacket off the rack and tells me bluntly, "You have to buy that." It fits perfectly.
Then she starts perusing the bins. She soon settles into a theme inspired by a mint green housecoat, the colour reminding her of houses on Grand Manan Island.
Finally she picks a soft brown textured jacket off a wall rack. I remark that it's fortunate she found the jacket.
"I saw it when I came in," she says. "I was just lucky it was still there."
We check out-$24.95, the lowest bill to date. The shopping day ends there, Jen with her second bag of quilting material and me with my houndstooth jacket.
Perhaps it was a mid-life artistic crisis that hit about the time Jen turned 40, but one day during a trip to the Frenchy's store in Oromocto, NB, she started thinking about quilts. She became captivated by the kaleidoscope of colours in the bins and considered the possibility of making art from the fabric she found there-as a way of challenging her use of colour in painting, her primary medium as an artist.
"The idea came from trying to come up with those really interesting, surprising colour combinations in paint," she says. "So often you are not surprised, and the palate adheres to the rules of colour harmony and triad and colour chords. This is how I saw the world, in these expected colour relationships. But I was trying to pin down what you would have to do to get the combinations that you see when the sky is white and the clouds are blue, to see these situations that are all around but not exactly recorded in that way.
"I like the serendipity of colours [at Frenchy's]. I've always been open to serendipity, when I can be taken by surprise by colour."
When Jen had pieced together a couple of prototypes, she expanded the idea to include compositions from each of the Frenchy's outlets in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. She imposed a discipline on the project. She would visit only Guy's Frenchy's outlets. She wouldn't control the material she would use in the quilts-there would be one visit, one bag of clothing, one quilt. Each work would be an expression of a moment of time among the Frenchy's bins, each one filled with the stories of the people who once had clothing-or Holly Hobbie bedroom sets-that have been taken apart and reassembled as art.
"It's mysterious," she says. "You are creating a fiction. You are putting people together, the trousers and the pink robe, an ominous duality. This stuff is used and it has a history. If you were working with new fabric it would be a very different project."
Jennifer Beckley lives in a white farmhouse surrounded by green fields and gardens in the St. John River Valley outside Fredericton, with her husband, Tom, and their children, Sam and Lena. The clapboard house with a tin roof looks like it's been sitting on the hillside for decades, when in fact it was constructed under Jen's direction a year ago. She was trying to recreate the feel of old farmhouses she admired during her childhood in Maine.
Her interest in art emerged in Maine and was refined during her study of drawing and painting at the University of Wisconsin, where she earned a Master of Fine Arts. After relocating to Alberta she moved to New Brunswick, two years later becoming a member of the faculty at the New Brunswick College of Craft and Design, in Fredericton.
"Frenchy's Sutra" is Jen's first entry into the world of quilting, although there is a long tradition of quilting and sewing in her family. Her grandmother Katherine Schott made quilts and braided rugs. Jen has one of her grandmother's quilts in the hallway, an intricate pattern of tiny squares that incorporates pieces of her baby clothes cut and stitched by hand. Her mother, Joan Weibe, is an expert quilter in the modern tradition, creating masterpieces of the type seen at country fairs, with complicated geometric patterns.
The Frenchy's project is a tribute to the art of quilting in an earlier time and place, when women worked with the fabric they had at hand to keep their families warm-a time when chance and necessity came together to create the kinds of improvisational quilts that art historians now recognize as important works of art.
One of the inspirations for the Frenchy's Sutra quilts is the work of African American women in the community of Gee's Bend, Alabama, who developed a remarkable tradition of quilting. This isolated village, which was once a white plantation with a population of black slaves, became one of the most impoverished communities in the United States after the Civil War. The women worked in the fields during the day and quilted at night, often sewing on their laps, the image of the quilts already worked out in detail in their minds. In recent years the Gee's Bend quilts have toured major art galleries throughout North America, admired for their use of bold colour and irregular shapes.
In the summer of 2005, Jen and her mother visited a Gee's Bend exhibition in Boston. "What I really loved about being in the presence of the quilts was just the magnitude of the colour statement," Jen says. "It doesn't seem like that should be shocking, but it was because they are huge, queen-size pieces on the wall. They stand about eight feet tall. The drama of that big bold colour, [you have] to consciously do that. It's not intuitive when you have fabric and you're cutting it up.
"The body of work for the Gee's Bend women is tremendous, but the tradition is built out of necessity. It is an aesthetic unto itself. Fabric was not to be wasted."
Michael Camp, a New Brunswick journalist and dedicated Frenchy's shopper, says that by paying homage to things that are not new, the Frenchy's Sutra project weaves together fragments of stories we will never know.
Jen is "taking a cultural sampling," he says. "There's a lot of what it means to be human in textiles. Used clothing has an aura. I think the fact that it has a life before you find it adds to its value. It's like a painting that increases in value through its life-the passage of time enriches its value. Clothes that have been around for a long time even feel better.
"I like the idea that they have a history. I think clothes that have a past are better than clothes with no past."
On a warm morning last spring, months after our afternoon of shopping together on New Brunswick's Eastern Shore, I arrive at the Beckley farmhouse to check on the progress of the quilts. The windows are thrown open and a comforter hangs out of a second-floor bedroom window. Jen is working in her studio, which is drenched in sunlight. Her workspace is filled with plastic bins of fabric and piles of completed quilts.
She's preparing for a showing of her quilts, running from July to late August at the Finnish American Heritage Center Gallery in Hancock, Michigan. During the show she has had a partially completed quilt set up in the gallery, inviting patrons to add a few stitches.
"From the very beginning I wanted the pieces to reflect the interaction of the day, to reflect a particular time," she says. "That's the whole thing about using the Frenchy's fabric, which changes in the bins daily and you can't predict what's there. So having the pieces open to people stitching on them seems like a natural part of that process. It's not my piece that I have to finish myself, but something that I am offering out there that I am engaged with, and inviting people to make some stitches.
"To be invited to participate is challenging, and makes you think about what the piece is. The object itself is a byproduct of the process."
Jen plans to tour the quilts through Atlantic Canadian galleries when they return from Michigan. In the meantime, the creative energy of Frenchy's Sutra continues to flow.
She lays the quilts out on the floor, one on top of the other: the trousers and pink robe from Bouctouche, the Grand Manan mint quilt from Shediac, Acadian colours from Moncton, plaid shirts from Liverpool. The pile grows higher and we begin to consider the stories in the pieces of fabric, the thread that binds them together, and how this seems to be merging into a larger story.
"I'm reaching for something," Jen says, as we sit back for a moment to admire the array of colours and shapes stretched out across the studio floor. "I'm not sure exactly what I'm reaching for but I'm compelled to do it."