Textile Artist Priscilla Smith Weaves Messages Into Her Art

Are we too protected from the violence of war to understand what it means to those involved? That's a question Chatham resident and textile artist Priscilla Smith pondered as she thought about exhibiting 13 of her social justice and anti-war quilts last month. The exhibit, titled "Images of War," was on display at the Unitarian Universalist Meeting House for several weeks, from mid-December to the end of the month.

The pieces on display were created between 2010 and 2019 and were designed to take away that protected distance and bring the violence of war face to face with the viewer. "The processes and materials are designed to generate discomfort, sadness and shock on the part of the viewer," she said.

With her use of fabric renderings of guns, knives and other instruments of violence, her art pieces are designed to stimulate reflection and get the word out. "Let's think about these things," she said. "Can we look for other ways to resolve our differences?" The recent exhibit at the Meeting House was the first time these pieces had been displayed as a collection.

A retired senior attorney and accomplished harp player, Smith grew up making her own clothes and yet never thought of herself as an artist. "My mother was an artist," she said, but Smith herself couldn't manage more than a C in the subject in school, she recalled with a laugh.

Heading up the employment law division of Prudential Insurance Company, Smith often wound up dealing with some of the same issues that would eventually show up in her art. To relieve the stress of the job she looked into a couple of hobbies. First, she took up the harp, initially on a whim. She found a teacher who shared her newfound passion and took a lesson every month. When she retired to Chatham in 2002 she brought her harp with her and still performs occasionally.

She was also encouraged by her sister in law to explore quilting to relieve stress. Using her well-established sewing skills, she began putting colors and fabrics together in different ways. Smith ultimately made dozens of award-winning traditional quilts.

By 2005 she had decided to move away from traditional quilt design and focus on more abstract creations, making her own designs and her own fabrics to communicate significant messages with textiles. After completing a three-year art cloth mastery program, she was accepted into the juried nationwide Art Cloth Network and her work is now shown through the group's juried exhibitions.

"A lot of my work has an anti-war message," Smith says. She tries to create images that reflect, in the case of war, its horror and dark side. Her materials are chosen with that specific result in mind.

One of the quilts displayed in the recent exhibit at the UUMH was titled "Transmigration of Souls II." It incorporates unforgettable remnants of buildings and planes from Sept. 11, "juxtaposing this chaos against a beautifully colored dyed piece of fabric in which some viewers see fire and burning buildings beyond, and others see a beautiful sunset," she wrote. "It often feels to me as if we need to try to ‘hold’ both...the horror and the beauty."

Other examples of her social justice work include a country schoolhouse superimposed with multiple handguns to communicate the proliferation of handguns in this country, as well as a hand-stitched outline of the haunting face of Trayvon Martin, superimposed on a network of 100 crosses, to reflect Smith's take on one of the significant issues of the day.

In 2020, with the advent of COVID, Smith's art took another direction.

"I became immersed in printmaking," she said. Online workshops are a source of new ideas, she said, and she spent the time during COVID learning new techniques and finding new ways to express her political convictions.

Recently she said she has given herself permission to do "something small" and she is working on a series of six-by-six-inch pieces in a sketchbook. "It's a notebook just for me," she said, "and a continual learning process," she added.

She believes the messages in her art are making a difference and impacting others. She has occasionally heard from those who have been moved but "most of the time we will never know." She realizes that it may not be easy to look at these images.

“My work is a little harder to see," she says. "But these issues matter so much to me."