Laurie Bushbaum, a quilter, sewist, and garment-maker, sent in her application to participate in the exhibition, The Baldishol: A Medieval Tapestry Inspires Contemporary Textiles, more than a year ago–in April 2019. Appropriately, she took her inspiration from the seed-bearer of April in the old tapestry. She wrote, “While the coat I have designed has pockets for future seeds, the garment is meant to show us the beauty and abundance of what blossoms in later seasons from our seed planting.”
The original Baldishol coat concept sketch
The coat is made of cotton fabrics; the sections are pieced and include both machine applique and machine quilting. When Laurie’s coat is on display at Norway House, it will be close to home for the artist. Laurie is from Minneapolis, and her mother used to attend services at Mindekirken, the Norwegian Lutheran Church next to the Norway House Building.
As Laurie sewed and quilted her coat, four seasons passed, all represented in the finished piece. Inclusion of the whole year ties in well to the original Baldishol Tapestry, which scholars guess is only a fragment of a frieze representing all twelve months.
Can you guess which details represent spring, autumn, and winter?
Fabric and Faith
The Baldishol Tapestry themes of calendars and seasons are referenced directly in Laurie’s coat, and resonate in her personal seasons of life right now.
She is a woman of cloth in her work, and also a “woman of the cloth.” She has been an ordained minister for 35 years. She is retiring this summer, she wrote, “so that she can spend the rest of her life playing with fabric and sharing that joy with others.” Laurie was also attracted to the Baldishol Tapestry because its discovery in a church, centuries after it was woven. (Read more of that story here.)
Laurie learned to sew when she was ten, and was introduced to quilting at 13, when she inherited a box of unfinished quilt squares from her great-grandmother. Through her lifetime of work with fabric, needlework became a form of prayer and meditation. Putting together scraps into a new creation is a spiritual practice, using what is at hand and piecing together life’s experiences into a whole.
The Coat as a Prayer
The Medieval tapestry commemorates a long-ago spring season. None of the artists in the Baldishol exhibit will ever forget April, May, and now June of 2020, in our year of pandemic and protest. In Laurie’s coat, she sewed the names of plants and seeds considered Sacred or Holy. The coat became a prayer that took on added meaning as she stitched this spring.
My prayer is that we now plant a garden that rises both for the earth and for humanity. Before it is too late, the “greening power of the Earth, spoken of by 14th Century mystic Julian of Norwich must rise through our hands. Here in the City of Minneapolis and everywhere, old systems must die. Justice must rise and bloom for people of color. Only then will we all be free in paradise. Laurie Bushbaum, June 2020