Reaching a milestone in my adult life and with a focus on my art, I am finally moving toward the use of my skills as a textile artist to study and celebrate the history of my heritage. Learning, sharing, and celebrating… perhaps to leave a touch of a legacy for my own family is a new and hopefully enduring passion.

Many years ago I made and taught others to print photos using a product called PICTURE THIS to transfer photos onto cloth and create MEMORY QUILTS… I kept my family history that way and shared the quilts with family members.

Today, there are so many opportunities to use creative art practices to blend the history of a life story into our work, so I am hoping that this next year I can move my art practice and time into celebrating somehow the world that was built on the lives of those who walked before me.

( I have seen the photo below celebrated in several pieces of beautiful artwork – an inspiration)

Difficult days faced so many in the last century. My Mom, below on the top step, to your right, was a Cherokee Native American child in Oklahoma, and lived through many trials and difficult times during her young life… losing her sister from scarlet fever and two years earlier, her mother, giving birth to her baby brother. She helped raise the little man…my favorite uncle. But strong and committed, she stepped up, studied, trained, and became an Operating Room, Surgeon’s Nurse Assistant in Detroit, Mich during WWI, and there she met my father in her 20s who was a young Jockey from Kentucky.

ANCESTRY studies have shared with me that my paternal grandparents were from Ballingarry, Ireland in County Limerick, and Newmarket in England, a home base for Thoroughbred Horse Racing. A family of nine, they left the UK to immigrate to the US as WWI began, bringing their children and thoroughbred horses to Kentucky. Dad was a wild, teenage Jockey in his youth. He fell and lost an arm at age 18 while working to couple train cars together in his young-adult job working to right a series of train cars after an accident, and thanks to the New York Central RR, was supported and lived on, growing his job progress, and Yard Master, Detroit, Michigan administration status while working on the railroad the rest of his life.

Beauty reigns in the stories of our lives…

So, how can I bring, (and hope you will consider) sharing a connection to our lives in the ART we create? I can’t wait to see what each of our artists share during their next post to be revealed at the end of September.

Prompt: HERITAGE, August 2022, B. Garner