Jane Voorheis

I believe in time travel. Feelings and memories can move through time cradled within objects. These objects are heirlooms. These objects can be born with a function or without. Hand-me-down cloth items hold evidence of the lives they’ve held, worn spots in the shape of the bodies they’ve wrapped around. Cloth is imbued with memory that transcends time.

I collaborate with fiber and the immaterial experiences of my own life to create heirlooms that will travel through time beyond myself. An heirloom can be many things that are inherited; recipes, cultural traditions, and more. My own inheritance of heirlooms has been interrupted. I am using research and making as tools as I seek to unforget cultural and familial knowledge and ways of making that have been lost as a consequence of numerous disruptions in Ojibwe lifeways such as the boarding school era, and the time before the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978 for example, both of which prevented Native Americans from raising their own children for multiple generations.

The personal is very important to my work. I have a need for my belongings to become a part of me. I achieve this through customization and additive processes, collaborations with cloth such as visible mending, alteration, and other ways of adorning. This practice is present in the clothing I wear, and the cloth I create, both of which I see as precious objects that will be passed on to my own kin.