A Quilt to Return To

"A Quilt to Return To" began through conversations and time spent with Kenan Usta, a quilt maker in Turkey. Working alongside him, Batur learned the process through watching, repeating, and making. She later brought this process into a live durational performance, making a quilt in front of an audience.

The performance keeps the labour of making visible as the quilt gradually takes form. Gestures learned through observation are repeated through Batur’s own body. Repetition becomes a way of learning, while allowing what has been learned to shift through the process.

Made in an intense red and taking the form of a vulva, the quilt intervenes in the domestic and cultural histories it carries. Quilts hold a particular place within Turkish domestic culture, including their presence in bridal chests and their association with marriage and the home. Batur takes this familiarity and makes something sensual, bodily, and deliberately difficult to hide. The vulva emerged first through intuition, then as a way of giving visible form to a part of the female body that is so often concealed, regulated, and sexualised.

There is something of a bridal quilt in the work, but one made for Batur herself, without the condition of becoming a bride. The object remains connected to intimacy, the bed, and domestic life, while its meaning is no longer organised around marriage or the duties attached to it. Its vivid red evokes the body, menstruation, and desire. The quilt becomes unapologetically visible, sensual and allowed to occupy space.

"A Quilt to Return To" stays with the tradition from which it begins while changing what its gestures are allowed to produce. Return happens through making: learning a process, inhabiting it through the body, and making something for oneself without accepting the conditions that once surrounded it.