Seeing As Art

Point Roberts has a moderately moribund Voters’ Association (all Americans) and an equally somnolent Property Owners’ Association (mostly Canadians, although American property owners can join). They keep some kind of indolent watch over the body politic here. Four or five years ago, the Voters’ Association, led by its president, became convinced that the sizable number of abandoned properties (houses, trailers, barns) was at the heart of our stagnant community and was preventing robust development. Somehow the absence of jobs and infrastructure was abandoned in the causative background.

The Property Owners’ Association was not worried about this phenomenon because it was largely their houses, trailers, and RV’s that were at issue. The Voters’ Association President made the 90-mile round trip to the county seat (Bellingham, in Whatcom County) to talk this all over with the County Council. Because, in fact, all this attractive nuisance property involved some kind of zoning violation, the County agreed to send someone up to issue notices of violation to the properties in question. And lo! The notices were made manifest.

I didn’t know anything about this because I never know much about anything until the monthly paper (The All Points Bulletin) comes out on the first of each month. When I saw the newspaper story, I was appalled because, although none of those abandoned properties were mine, there were several of them I was very fond of. They included houses on the main roads that one saw every day as they slowly returned from whence they came, a journey that would clearly take many years and had already been going on for many years.

Fearing that they would all disappear because of the county action, I did about all I could: I took pictures of the abandoned houses that I knew about, as well as inquired of friends about others that they might know about. It was obvious from the newspaper that there were more of them than I had imagined. Several had been immediately torn down before the newspaper even came out. However, after the county made its stand, it retreated back to Bellingham with, apparently, no follow-up. Still, those community members that liked these derelict houses felt that more attacks could come. In a crisis that doesn’t directly involve me, my first thought is, ‘Would a quilt help?’ Almost always, the answer to that question is, 'No.’ But, a quilt never hurts. So I decided to make a pictorial quilt of each of the houses I had photographed. I had never made a pictorial quilt before and had no drawing skills to speak of. But it somehow seemed doable because it seemed that it needed to be done.

A friend heard about my endeavor and arranged for me to visit more of these houses, ones off the main road, and to go inside them and photograph them. Several were among the first houses built in Pt. Roberts. Eventually, I had photographs of 17 buildings and eventually I made quilted portraits of each of them. The quilts range from fourteen-inches square, to about 52”x40”. You can see them here: Abandoned House Quilts. They have been on exhibit a number of times in various places and have taught me more about seeing and sewing than I would have imagined I could have learned. Here is a picture of a particular house in a particular field or a particular forest. Here is fabric. How do you make lovely, soft fabric look like wood and rocks and plants and doors and stone chimneys and ocean and things fresh and things decaying? Each new house posed the question anew and each had to be answered in a different way because each of the houses was different. They were old and they were usually collapsing in one way or another, but they had been cared about as homes and in some cases were still cared about for their past lives. They were surviving in their way with great dignity as they went through this long process.

Since I started this project, perhaps six of the houses have completed their lives: torn down for a new house and eventual home or collapsed entirely in severe weather. The quilted pictures of them will last, of course. That is something of a problem, though, as I am the custodian of all these quilts. Two have been entrusted to people whose lives were touched by the buildings: one a woman who rode horses in a barn now gone, the other a woman whose mother was born in a house now gone. But the rest are with me. Perhaps Ed should build a museum for them.

Regardless of what happens to them eventually, the process itself has tied me to the community in a way I would never have anticipated. They are my stake in Pt. Robert’s past and they anchor my present here. Unlike anywhere else I have ever lived (and there have been a lot of places), I am a part of this community.