Textile creation for “Common Threads” project in honor of St. Brigid

“Common Threads” project textile held up to light for a nice stained glass effect and to highlight the bojagi technique of hidden stitches

I am the Irish Consulate of San Francisco’s chosen artist to participate in a global project: “Common Threads” in celebration of St. Brigid’s Day 2023. See the gallery showcasing each piece and the artist who created it.

As an Irish-American using materials endemic to this place where I live, I am contributing a small part of a larger cloak or “brat” to be assembled from pieces coming from all over the world and to be exhibited in Dublin in February 2023. It will be the first time in history that Lá Fhéile Bhríde (Brigid’s Feast Day, the traditional pagan Imbolc, or beginning of spring) is observed as a public holiday, the first named after a woman. It’s an honor to contribute my many layered work to this worldwide project!

St. Brigid is both a goddess and a saint, and a patroness of many things, not only the Patroness of Ireland: poetry, learning, healing, protection, blacksmithing, livestock, and dairy production. St. Brigid’s cloak is often depicted as a patchwork of colors and materials, and is central to the story of how she founded her church and became Ireland’s patron saint. As the video for the project explains: “The myth of St. Brigid’s cloak explains how her first church was founded. Only given enough land that her cloak would cover, Brigid and her sisters pulled the four corners of her cloak and it miraculously expanded across many acres.”

The aim of “Common Threads” is 1) to promote and support textile work—a traditionally female industry and art form, 2) to symbolically honor the legend of St. Brigid’s cloak, and 3) to visually represent the reach of the Irish consular network.

As “Common Threads” aims to visually represent the reach of the Irish consular network, for my textile I chose to use a selection of dyed silk and cotton dyed with plants endemic to this place—San Francisco/Yelamu. My textile square is  made of plant-dyed silk (the backing is cotton) using California native plants as dyes. Over the years I have been using plants as dyes, I have often been asked: “What are you going to do with the fabric/yarn/textiles? Since 2017 the experiment of foraging or growing plants, using seeing what color they give as dyestuff, and having that result has been sufficient. But this idea has also always been in the back of my mind: to create patchworks of the various colors together. Celebrating St. Brigid and her legacy is a way I can situate myself as a woman textile artist and strongly in my Irish heritage. It has been a profound personal exploration to represent this place—San Francisco—which I have come to know deeply, while reconnecting to our family’s place of origin.

Here is the result of piecing together California native plant dyed silk and cotton into a bojagi (a traditional Korean wrapping cloth made by patchwork) square. I am most attracted to bold colors, but with this palette I love the muted hues of the yellows and pinks playing against each other, and set off by the dark brown.

The plants I used are:

California Sagebrush

Cypress

Manzanita

California Poppy

Ceanothus

California Wild Rose

Red Flowering Currant

Elderberry

Purple Sage