Artist’s Title:  THE CLOSED FIST:  Addressing physical and emotional abuse

This is not an Artist`s Statement, rather it is an explanation of my process of design in creating this textile piece on Domestic Violence or Intimate Partner Violence.  If you have never experienced this issue yourself, I hope that what you see when looking at my work may bring some awareness of this very tragic issue and if you have experienced Intimate Partner Violence or Domestic Violence, yourself, I hope you may find some meaning to my piece. 

Abuse has many faces:  physical abuse, emotional abuse, financial abuse, sexual abuse, elder abuse.  Each person’s experience with abuse is individual onto itself.  Given my own personal experience with this issue and working in textiles, as I have done for over sixty years, I have tried to use my work to bring a visual awareness to this very traumatic issue of gender-based violence against women perpetrated by men.  When I created my first quilt in this series called “Coercive Control” it was to bring a focus to a form of abuse referred to as Coercive Control which is presently under consideration in Bill (C-332) before our Canadian Parliament today.  I then created “The Porch, Opening the Door to Recovery” and what that could look like visually.  But, I was always aware that there was one piece missing in-between these two works and that was in visually addressing abuse itself but how does one interpret abuse in a visual sense without offending the viewer? 

And so, as I was trained to do in Art College, I set about to write my POV or Point of View on what I hoped to say visually in this piece.  I chose as my subjects the physical and emotional aspect of abuse as I felt this could be demonstrated visually in a sense.  I planned to use Botticelli’s Venus again as my focal point of a woman abused because to me she represents historically a beautiful but vulnerable woman.  In writing out my POV I asked myself what lay behind abuse.  To me, the answer is anger, anger along with all that lies behind the reason for anger.  And I also knew that unless I put myself into this piece, personally, the feelings I was hoping to convey would not be there.

I began to lay out my fabrics as painters do their paints.  I purposely chose fabrics that `spoke` to me visually about the subject of abuse.  Thus the colour of red, to me,  represents anger.  The colour black, I chose to represent the grief and despair felt by victims of abuse.   For my ‘Venus’, I chose a very attractive print with a black background, combining, I felt, the beauty of who my Venus is as a woman and the black background reflecting the pain and suffering she experiences in an abusive relationship.  For the perpetrator of the abuse, I chose a ghostly grey print that reminded me of the harshness and visual weight of cement and I deliberately chose a contrasting colour for the perpetrators arm and fist to bring attention to the means by which many women are assaulted.  For the woman being assaulted, I chose a soft and delicate fabric.  Abuse, visually, is not something one might wish to see on a wall quilt, it is not pretty at all.  As to the mental abuse, I decided that words were the only way to enable the viewer to have an understanding of abuse.  Carefully embroidered. I chose three comments made to and about me personally in relation to the abuse I experienced which were intentionally hurtful towards me. I placed these comments on the red of anger with a brief explanation embroidered opposite the comments.  And so the design developed.

With my ‘Venus’ I tried to describe visually what it feels like to be suddenly attacked and assaulted by someone ,especially an intimate partner.  It’s like a bolt of lightning running through your body, thus, my Venus has a bolt of lightning coursing through her body falling into a pool of despair below.  But by then any thought of design principles that I would normally use departed and Thus, I visually ‘spoke’ of my frustration with a small piece of cloth of multiple shapes and colours, completely different from the other fabrics and placed it on the upper right side of my work.  And then I had to walk away from it.  It was stirring up too many painful memories and emotions in me.  The design felt disturbing to me.  Then one night a week or so later, I was awakened in the middle of the night with words clearly speaking to me in my mind.  They were:  “when kindness turns into cruelty, when love turns into hatred, it is time to leave; you are no longer safe”.  I returned to my work the following morning and finished the piece.  Colours, shapes, words that I hope will allow the viewer to have a sense of what abuse feels like to be a victim of Domestic Violence and Intimate Partner Violence.  ||

And then I asked Mary Light who machine quilts my work, how she felt about it.  Here are her words:  When I read Sandy’s artist statement I was deeply saddened and longing for justice for her. As I began quilting this piece, I knew that all of the text needed to be emphasized. The feeling of anger portrayed by the red fabric needed sharp and jerky quilting lines – I felt frustration that words can wound so deeply. To me, the black curved lines under the red fabric, around ‘Abuse Hurts’, and over and under ‘Despair’, show how these wounds from words can weigh one down – making it hard to move forward. The dots and dashes around the victim struck down are representative of messaging SOS (a plea for help) from earlier times. One of the last areas I quilted was the image of the perpetrator – I was angry and the quilting reflects that – more of a scribble than carefully completed. I didn’t want anything ‘nice’ in that quilting. This quilt carries an important message that we need to hear. When love turns into hatred – it is time to leave.

Design created, hand appliqued: (c) 2023 Sandra Small Proudfoot, AOCA ’89.
Machine quilted by Mary Light,
Photographed by Pete Paterson