Last Friday Night

Presenting quilts alongside copies of objects that represent life as a college-aged woman today made out of wood, I juxtapose the gendered craft history of woodworking with stereotypically feminine objects. These objects are then performed and recorded through video. The performances prove that the objects have lost their original function. The work constructs an alternate reality for a story of a hypothetical night. It is a stage for an exaggerated performance of gender.

Quilts are objects that hold cultural memory. We associate them with family, warmth, and the safety of childhood. As a child sewing was something that was passed down to me. Through my work, I question what it means to be a woman and how that identity, and the expectations that come with it, change as I grow. Quilts function as a security blanket while the other objects in my work confront themes of vulnerability.

By using familiar forms in a new material, I remove them from their context and create an object that sits between familiarity and the unknown. 

Bio

Olivia Van Oot is a woodworker based in Portland, Maine. She currently attends Maine College of Art & Design in the Woodworking and Furniture Design program, completing her Bachelors in Fine Arts in May 2024.

Her work utilizes American Pieced Quilt patterns, evoking feelings of comfort, safety, and home. This quilt imagery exists beside work about hyper-femininity and contemporary college life. By making work out of wood, a stereotypically masculine material, she questions the notions of gendered disciplines within the craft community and what it means to be a woman, a party girl, and a woodworker.