And the answer was “yes.” By the time my second full academic year was winding down, I was beginning to get traction with each part of my responsibilities as a teaching faculty member and a studio maker. I’d learned a lot in a short time, and the beauty of it was – as I’d realize nearly two decades later – I’d keep learning until the day I’d pack it all up and take on the emeritus mantle. But I get ahead of myself...

Everything I’ve ever made came from impulses I harbored to try to figure out why I felt as I did about whatever – about myself, about my relationships, about the maddeningly diverse and divergent things I was interested in out there in the world. My mind always seemed to be tooling along in overdrive, so sometimes it was a challenge to rein in that cerebral busyness and sharpen or narrow my focus so that I could move more deeply into a subject, take more concentrated time with it in order to give it convincing visual form. When I look now at work completed over these last fifty years, I see in each piece my struggle to pull meaning from the act and art of living, to find order in the messiness of being. When I zero in more specifically on the work that I developed and executed in those first years in academia, I recognize in it my need both to feel grounded, and to take a fuller measure of where I’d come from.

This photograph, taken by my father in 1949 when I was a few months old, has followed me around for all of my adult life. Whenever I studied it, I was filled with questions. What was my father feeling when he recorded me sound asleep? What was I dreaming? What would follow when I woke? At that age, would I have noticed the cheery regularity of the bedroom’s wallpaper? What was I then, but a blank slate?

A Strange Riddle, 2002, 57” h x 75.5” w. Digitally-developed & digitally-printed cotton; reactive dyes; machine-pieced & machine-quilted; private collection. Photo credit: Larry Gawel

A passage concerning the mystery of infantile amnesia from one of Freud’s essays on the nature of memory was one of the triggers for this visual meditation on both my personal past and the more general functions of the brain – both the infant’s and the adult’s – in the interpretation of pattern. The child’s – my – neurological immaturity would likely have prevented the assimilation, the ‘reading’ of visual patterns like the one in the genteel floral wallpaper of that first room in which I dreamed, heard my parents’ voices, saw light and shadow play. There would have been other aural patterns too, radio voices or song playing nearby, or birdsong by the windows, that would have filled the air around me. Was I aware, at the time?

My first science fair project as an eighth-grader was a very rudimentary study of the human brain (in hindsight, a cringeworthingly uninteresting “study”) that nonetheless instilled a lifelong fascination. Diagnostic procedures following an intense bout of vertigo in the late 1990s had provided me with the opportunity to acquire an MRI image of my own brain. I overlaid it with multiple layers of the Freud quotation addressing the enigma of infantile amnesia.

“I believe we accept too indifferently the fact of infantile amnesia -- that is, the failure of memory for the first years of our lives -- and fail to find in it a strange riddle. We forget of what great intellectual accomplishments and of what complicated emotions a child of four years is capable. We really ought to wonder why the memory of later years has, as a rule, retained so little of these psychic processes, especially as we have every reason for assuming that these same forgotten childhood activities have not glided off without leaving a trace in the development of the person, but that they have left a definite influence for all future time.” *

View of the back of A Strange Riddle, with its upper right-hand quadrant (detail view right) enclosing the full Freud quotation. The quilting of this piece was done in four sections, and then the sections were joined with a narrow machine- and hand-stitched binding to conceal the seams.The horizontally flipped images of printed clouds suggest a Rorschach inkblot pattern, appropriate to the piece’s leitmotif.

I was still on the uphill side of learning the various software programs I’d continue to work with in the ensuing years. The limitations that lack of CAD experience imposed sometimes resulted in unexpected narrative solutions. I’d transcribed the Freud quotation into Quark, a publishing program I occasionally used back then to lay out text. When I copied that file into Adobe Photoshop, the destination program couldn’t read it and instead created a garbled and slightly out-of-focus “interpretation.” A second short of deleting the error, I recognized that it stood in beautifully for the indecipherable – to my infant self – language that my parents exchanged fluently but that was no more than sounds to my child’s brain. With Photoshop allowing me to render these glyphs in color, they became a symbolic pattern of puzzle piece-like forms alluding to language and perhaps saying more than the original, literal transcription might have.

The left-hand image resulted when Photoshop failed to read a Quark file I’d imported. I hesitated as I was about to delete the error, and that split second gave me enough time to recognize how useful the image might be to the story-in-progress.

The final panel encloses a droning mantra, “I remember, I do not remember.” In the second and subsequent versions of the quilt, I created a pseudo-wallpaper repeat pattern of a pair of my first baby shoes to backdrop the repeated phrases. The shoes, like the original photograph that prompted the series, have followed me along life’s course. Biography’s flotsam and jetsam.

In the first version of A Strange Riddle I imagined the bedroom’s wallpaper being a pale, grayish green. When, on a visit home to Massachusetts, I showed a length of that fabric to my mother and asked if she recognized it, she hesitated for fifteen seconds or so, then remembered. “The bedroom on State Street,” she said, “but the wallpaper was pink!” I eventually completed three additional versions of A Strange Riddle, each with the corrected wall paper coloration.

A Strange Riddle 3, 2002, 32.25” h x 48.5” w. Digitally-developed & digitally-printed cotton; reactive dyes; machine-pieced & machine-quilted; private collection. Photo credit: Larry Gawel

My parents moved into that tenement apartment on State Street in New Bedford, MA, just north of the city’s Common Park, not long before my birth. It had been my great-grandmother Teresa Eccles James’s apartment, and she meant the world to my father. Born in 1918, he’d lost his mother when he was four, his father when he was fifteen, and his “Gramma James” had helped to raise him and his siblings. Throughout my childhood, he spoke of her with real reverence and a keen nostalgia. Teresa died three months before my birth, and they settled into her flat, the bedroom with her pink wallpaper becoming my nursery.

Not until I’d grown and lived half a life, moving to Nebraska in the interim, had I come by sufficient genealogical information to begin to piece together a more detailed outline of her life. Born in Preston, Lancashire, England, she was a mill worker, a cotton weaver, when she married Joseph James, himself a “self actor minder” – someone who tended the automatic spinning mules in a cotton mill – in 1888. With their first two children in tow, the eldest being my grandfather, the first Robert A. James, they emigrated to southeastern New England in the mid-1890s. Four more children would follow. Many among their offspring and my father’s generation would, like them, land on the working floors of New Bedford mills, including my Dad, Robert Jr., who worked as a loom fixer’s assistant in the weave room of the Firestone Tire Manufacturing Company for ten years, decamping around the time of my birth for a clerk’s position in the North End location of our local A&P (The Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company, a now defunct food market chain that, at the time of my childhood, was one of the largest retailers in the US). He spent the next thirty-one years stocking shelves, working the cash register, unloading truckloads of merchandise, and eventually becoming his union’s shop steward. When he retired in 1981, he’d made it to assistant manager of a second New Bedford A&P location. He was dutiful, loyal and organized, traits I’ve inherited.

My great-grandmother Teresa Eccles James smiling alongside her brother Joseph and their mother, my great-great-grandmother Elizabeth Schofield Eccles, ca. 1924, the year of Elizabeth’s death. The location is most likely Joe’s small dairy farm in Fairhaven, MA. where Elizabeth spent her final years. In the photo at right, Teresa stands behind the State Street tenement house that would be my first home, perhaps a couple dozen years after the earlier photo, near the end of her own life. In every photo of her that survives, her smiles reveal the kindness and warmth that my father always remembered.

My people were mostly textile industry workers, hardworking and familiar with ten- to twelve-hour shifts on dank mill floors, cramped tenement apartments too hot in summer and too cold in winter, paychecks too modest for the numbers of mouths to feed, and ambitions frustrated by too few opportunities. What solace they found they extracted from their families, their parish churches and their church communities. They put their hopes in future generations, and when I started undergraduate school, it was with hundreds of other mill worker descendants who, like me, would be the first in their families to secure a university education.

That I would land back in textiles as my career track was surely serendipitous, but perhaps not surprising. The empire of cotton** had then and still has a very expansive sweep, pulling into its rapacious maw the millions of workers, unpaid as well as paid, who would make its industrial strength possible. A Strange Riddle stands, in part, as a tribute to these forebears and especially to a great-grandmother who rose to the Depression-era challenge of nurturing a gaggle of orphaned grandkids in the modest North End of a fading New England mill town. 

The power of family photographs to shape our identities...

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*Freud, Sigmund. The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, 1901. Translation by A. A. Brill, 1914. In Chapter 4, Childhood and Concealing Memories. Found online at this link: https://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Freud/Psycho/chap4.htm

**With thanks to Sven Beckerts’ The Empire of Cotton–A Global History (NY: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2014), in which southeastern New England mills figure directly in Chapter 13, “The Return of the Global South.”