When the chance came for a sit-down chat came about with one of our artists-in-residence, Catherine Reinhart, I was delighted to get to discuss The Collective Mending Sessions and her time at Uillinn. The Collective Mending Sessions is a series of socially engaged workshops centered on collaboratively mending a quilt. She has conducted workshops in various locations around the Midwest of the United States and further afield before taking it international with her Uillinn residency.
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| Collective Mending Sessions at the West Cork Arts Centre, Catherine Reinhart |
An interdisciplinary artist who creates fiber work and conducts socially engaged projects with abandoned textiles, Iowa-based, Catherine first arrived in West Cork last Summer, and was visiting her sister in Schull when she found out about the residency open call at Uillinn. She submitted her proposal upon discovering that many of the people she had been meeting in West Cork had an ongoing interest in working with fibre. “Every other conversation was like, ‘I have a textile degree,’ or, ‘I worked with textiles in this felting workshop in Kazakhstan,’ so when I made my proposal I just thought what a great way to welcome people into the studio and continue doing this project in an international way,” she says on making her decision to come back to West Cork.
Catherine also felt that a shared concern for the environment was something that situated the themes and principles of her arts practice in West Cork, namely through an interest in sustainability and environmental preservation. She explains, “The mending sessions is also about slowing down and an antidote to fast fashion and the culture of reuse and sustainable textile processes connected to the environment. I saw a lot of artists in West Cork and at the Uillinn who were concerned about the place and the landscape and protecting that and preserving that and so I thought that there’s some connections there.”
She tells me that some of the principles behind her arts practice are cultivating care for both cloth and the community and then relating the lessons learned from hand repair or mending to larger broken systems. “So what lessons can we learn from fixing our clothes that we can apply to fixing our relationships?” she summarises, “Or fixing the fractures that happen within our societies or in our communities?”
Catherine hopes that the Collective Mending Sessions encourage discussion, reflection and inquiry and that they can serve as a practical avenue into conducting these forms of questioning. “One of the driving questions of the project that we discuss around the quilt is, how do we mend our communities.” She asks, “What does that look like? Can it be done through art?” As an aside, she tells me that she thinks the answer to that is a definite ‘yes’.
Catherine hopes that participants can ask themselves what repair and mending within the community looks like on a personal level- that it leads them to evaluate and appreciate what skills, gifts, talents and time they have to be a restorative catalyst rather than a destructive one.
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| Collective Mending Sessions at the West Cork Arts Centre, Catherine Reinhart |
“Accumulation of small amounts of labour can add up to something quite impressive,” she explains, “We’re on our eighth quilt now in our fifth year of the project and when people come to the workshops they may only get 5 inches of stitching done but you’re joining hundreds of other people doing the same thing and it’s a really egalitarian, humbling experience.”
At the time of the interview Catherine was planning to hold a workshop on Sherkin Island, which hadn’t initially been part of the plan for her residency but came about organically through a combination of word-of-mouth and building connections at Uillinn. I ask if the workshop on Sherkin Island will follow the same format as more regular Collective Mending sessions.“I think they’re always kind of different,” Catherine says, “The format I’m planning for Sherkin is kind of drop-in and drop-out. Like I did the first Saturday here at Uillinn and that’s just to allow more people to be involved in the quilt. I’m hoping that the BA students are going to come and participate.”
“It’s really quite open to everyone,” she clarifies, noting that there is a Ukrainian community on the island too, ”We’re having it at the North Shore which is a very cozy spot, I hear.” Catherine is not holding any hard expectations and is happy to let the sessions’ participants guide the discussions. “I’ve read a bit about places that are remote having really robust repair cultures just because it’s a little more expensive or hard to get things onto an island but the conversations that we have during the project really depend on who’s there,” she notes, “and since it’s the residents of Sherkin I’m interested to know about their perspectives on repair and mending.”
Catherine Reinhart Artist Website https://www.catherinereinhart.com/
Collective Mending Sessions https://www.collectivemendingsessions.com/
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