19.5x19in, quilter’s cotton (machine-pieced) & hand-quilted (pearle cotton/floss), created in 2022, NFS

This quilt is meant to represent the witnessing of the mental health struggles of a client living with blindness. While working with someone struggling with mental health concerns, and physical blindness, I was struck by my lack of skill and understanding to attend to their exacerbation of symptoms due to their inability to see. Consider such things as acute depression, anxiety, loss of independence, adjusting to new life circumstances, navigating, reading & learning struggles, and many other barriers. In short, it led me to want to learn more, and enhance my clinical skills to support a marginalized group of people that were previously outside my scope of skilled practice.

What to look for: The improv/abstract piecing was a previous small quilt sewn for another purpose, which I then cut up and re-sewed to create its final state of being (symbolically representing my change in perspective). The hand-quilted x’s are an artistic expression of braille letters stating, “I can only be me now.” This process was a personal emotional response to the many things I learned from them. I also signed my name on the front as a reminder of the difficulty of even safely signing one’s name to anything in an ocularcentric world as a person with blindness.

Learn more:  https://preventblindness.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Mental-Health-Issue-BriefF.pdf

Book recommendation(s): These books are not meant to replace medical intervention and/or skilled therapy.

There Plant Eyes: A Personal and Cultural History of Blindness https://a.co/d/dtxnlqF