Our Father

Discarded plastic plants, cotton thread
11" x 11"
2025


While I was making the Post-Colonial quilt, I kept seeing an image of George Washington in my mind's eye. The plants wanted to render him too—as if he was their father. Here was a man founding a country with the promise of "liberty" but with complete disregard for culture, tradition, nature, connection to our communities and the earth. The plastic plants continue to show me their origin story—the birth of a world that attempts to recreate a lifeless image of nature while simultaneously destroying her.

He is clearly recognizable, yet anonymous. Not only representing George, but the "founding fathers"—the archetype of the man who fears nature and her power, now rendered in his own version of her, made to never die.