errant

Weaving beaded drawings and figurative sculptures together, Errant explores early childhood archetype storytelling. A doll-sized figure casts out long roping seed bead chains from her hands. The beaded drawings are derived from Quick’s early childhood reader, A.B. Baker’s Young Years: Best Loved Stories and Poems for Children (1971, Parents Press Magazine). Filled with insensitive imagery, antiquated terms, and unsettling archetypes, this reader was both fascinating and damaging. The peculiar quality of the illustrations and stories has deeply influenced how the artist sees, experiences, and questions the world around her. Odd and uncanny characters warrant further examination to expose the absurdity of their symbolic function. While addressed to children as role models, many characters reinforce unhealthy stereotypes and behaviors. These drawings crawl across the walls like uncanny toile while being held by another childhood role model, the doll. Quick uses the craft of beadwork, with its connections to faith, worry, devalued women’s work, and nostalgia of the handmade object, as a means to highlight the complexity of preserving heritage. Through this work, she searches for ways to examine and expose traumatic identity formation exacerbated by misinformation. By questioning narcissistic desire, nostalgia for past generations, and attempts to exert control over feelings of being adrift in an overstimulated world, she hopes to draw a questioning gaze at the troubling and unresolved layers that lurk beneath the surface as we try to shape our empathetic selves.