Heather Kerley

Echoing the tradition of Tibetan prayer flags, I stitched this banner to hang outside in my own yard in Bowie, Maryland, where I am nurturing a wildlife-friendly, native ecosystem. This gesture began as a way of offering prayers for healing this land, which has been scarred by centuries of exploitation, colonialism, and environmental degradation. This project has evolved into a cyclical, open-ended practice.

After my little banner hung in the elements all winter in 2023, I took it apart and added other found elements. These then continued to commune with each other and the elements, hanging from the crabapple tree outside my studio window. Among the components I incorporated were fabrics dyed with plants from the yard, embroidered and printed images of plants (again, from my yard), scraps of thread and vintage fabric. I have gone on to add more experimental elements, such as watercolor paper with marks from a handmade-feather brush. After being in the elements for so many months, there are new patterns and colors- constellations of mildew, uneven faded dyes, and dirt, along with all the unseen microbes and molecules present in the environment that are now woven into these fragments. 

These pieces have been disassembled twice now, reincorporated using additional scraps, and rehung in different parts of the yard. In this way, the banner has come to mirror the ever-changing face of ecosystems. Hanging the banner at the Adkins Arboretum symbolizes a reunification of wild ecosystems while also bringing up ideas of dispersal, recombination, and connection.

My latest series of mini-quilts is a love letter to the cycle the human hand has helped along for thousands of years in the practice of saving seeds for next year’s crop.

I’ve collected seeds and nuts from the native plants and trees in my yard and I’m making a quilted “seed bank.” Each miniature quilt in this series has the seeds preserved in a tulle capsule. These pieces speak to regeneration of life and how nothing in nature really ends but continues in an endless cycle.

I’ve also created a banner of small provisional pieces that will be in the yard through the winter as an open-ended gesture of hope and curiosity. I vaguely thought of these as “prayer flags” but I’m more intrigued by how transformed they will be by the sun, rain, snow, and moonlight.

It is through mixed media that I let myself play, fail, deconstruct, and reconfigure in an endless exploration.