cover me in blankets....

I love, love, love the work of Marie Watt. I have no brain power to say much more. But her use of hard and soft and the power of utilizing the familiarity of blankets to make amazing work about ritual and daily life is profound.

She says this about her work:

My work explores human stories and rituals implicit in everyday objects. I consciously draw from indigenous design principles, oral traditions, and personal experience to shape the inner logic of the work I make. My recent work explores the history of wool blankets. As I fold and stack blankets they begin to form columns that have references to linen closets architectural braces, memorials (Trajan); sculpture (Brancusi for one), the great totem poles of the Northwest and the conifer trees with which I grew up. These blanket forms also present themselves in other mediums of my work – such as with printmaking, bronze, and cedar. In the case of my wood cuts, I appreciate the warm tactile quality of the material. There is a familiarity and intimacy with wood that again reminds me of blankets. The material offers another layer of story that is physically and metaphorically woven into the work, like with cedar, which is considered to be a sacred natural resource for indigenous people of the Northwest or the hope chests in which blankets are stored.

See more at her website and then her galleries here and here.