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Diary
in Quilts: Interview with Penny Sisto
By Barbara
Stahura
Internationally-known fabric artist Penny Sisto (www.pennysisto.com) creates her unique works at her home of cedar logs in Southeastern Indiana. She has stitched hundreds of incredible quilted art pieces over the last 50 years, beginning at age 7 with a stitched portrait of a Gypsy man, which lit her creative fire. Yet with subjects such as war, AIDS, poverty, and even the female genital mutilation she witnessed while living with the Masaai in Kenya decades ago, her works are not meant to entice sweet dreams.
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I first met her in the mid-1990s and was instantly entranced by not only her vibrant art but by her gentleness and, to my Midwestern ear, the sweet lilt of her Scots accent that came from growing up in the Orkney Islands. The story of her early life is a horrific one, yet she emergedfrom the fire of physical and sexual abuse to become one of the most forgiving, gentle people I've ever known, as well as an artist who uses her talent to promote social justice and our common humanity. Her fabric art is her diary not only of what has happened to her but to the world over the last half-century. Earlier this year, Penny's work appeared in Thirteen Moons Gallery in Santa Fe, NM ).
Recently, producer Caroline Nellis filmed a touching documentary, "Woman of the Cloth: Fabric Artist Penny Sisto." It is available for $30, including S&H, from Captured Images, 920 Meyer Avenue, Evansville, IN 47710.
Barbara
Stahura: Tell me about your current projects.
Penny
Sisto: I wanted to get away from being so literal in my work. And
as a huge surprise to me, it seems to get more earthbound, more realistic.
The people on some of the latest quilts are so alive they almost scare
me. It used to be that I stitched pieces into being from inside me, and
now as I get older it far more seems like – as my body shrinks, as
my body ages, they gather all the energy I've put out into the world and
bring it back to me. That almost sounds kind of schizy. but they almost
seem to have taken the energy that I've put out into other things, like
the midwifing, gardening, dairy farming, and bring it all back to me.
They're very vibrant, very powerful pieces. They look more realistic in
a way, which is not the direction I wanted to go in. I wanted more abstract.
Instead of which, I can't. Not until I get all of these out. Gosh. It's
kind of a bummer, really. What can you do?
Barbara:
Like you say, they're waiting to be born, and they're going to be born
the way they want to be born.
Penny: Yeah.
Barbara:
A lot of your work deals with unpleasant topics, even harsh and disturbing
topics, like sexism or AIDS, the Vietnam War or the plight of the downtrodden.
Why did you feel it was necessary to do this, or how did they come about?
Penny: They came about not only from my own personal experience,
my life journey, which began very harshly and continued to be very rough
traveling into my 20s and early 30s, but I met a lot of other women who
had been child victims of sexual and physical violence. I met women who
had never, even into their crone years, spoken out. I felt a grave responsibility
that, since I had been given a small talent to put things down in a manner
in which other people could look at them and understand what I was feeling
or what the people in the quilt were feeling, I had the responsibility
not only to put down my story but to put down the stories that other women
brought to me – shadows of their life that they could never bring
out into the daylight.
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Barbara:
Even though the themes of a lot of your works are so harsh, they actually
draw people to them. A lot of people aren't repelled.
Penny: If you make something with fabric – fabric's so non-threatening,
it's so soft, it's so comforting, it's so female – if you say it
with fabric, there is no threat. People can approach it; they can touch
it. And so as they approach it, they too are soft. Their external softness
meets the external of the fabric, and they're wide open to it. Then you
have their attention, and you can say things there that perhaps you couldn't
say in a museum or in the printed word because it would be too graphic.
Barbara:
Your work also shows connections with many people around the world – Scotland, Africa, Native Americans, people with AIDS, even pop culture
icons like Oprah Winfrey and John Lennon. What is the connection you have
with all these people and cultures?
Penny: That's a strange thing. I think the reason is because I'm so dysfunctional.
I grew up with little or no sense of identity, and I've been told if you
treat children the way I've been treated, and they don't have one central
figure to really identify with and attach to as an infant, they kind of
free-float. When I am with my friend Ilse Meyer, I feel that I am a Jew,
and with my friend Ruth Mboya, I feel I am Kenyan, and if I go to the
church down in Appalachia where my daughter goes where they handle rattlesnakes,
I handle rattlesnakes. I'm so much a nobody that I'm capable of being
anybody.
Barbara:
You have told me that a lot of your work comes to you in visions or in
meditation. Do you think this is really Spirit or God expressing itself
to you in some way? Or what do you think that is?
Penny: I guess I believe in a lot of worlds that overlap. I guess I believe that
spirits are as visible to those with eyes to see as are trees, and just
at certain times when you can let go of your earthly self, your mind can
slip beyond that veil and see unspoken hopes. In my case because I'm a
figurative artist, I think they take figure. Maybe if I were a composer,
they would be notes.
Barbara:
Do all your works come to you that way?
Penny: No. Some don't, and I hate when they don't come that way, because it's
very hard to get anything meaningful. Sometimes you just catch shadows
of who you want to put down or what you want to put down.
Barbara:
Are you a religious person?
Penny: I hope not, because religion, as I seem to understand it, puts up barriers. I'm a spiritual person. I'm frightened of the word "religion," because if you get baptized you can join that one, and if you get circumcised you can join that one as a baby, and if you don't eat meat, you can come over here.
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Barbara: But still you have a lot of friends who are religious, even nuns and priests.
Penny: Yes. And beautiful people they are indeed. A lot of people find comfort in a cross, in a box, in a square. And I find my comfort in the circle – I guess again it harkens back to my childhood. I always had to stand in the sea to feel safe. To be in the circle of the sky and the earth and the ocean where there's no boundaries, no walls to get trapped against, no doors to have to go through or be dragged through. I like to keep things open.
Barbara: Do you have any one regret or sadness about your work?
Penny: Oh. I'm not a very good sewer. I regret that. One reason I regret it is because I can't hem pants straight.[laughs] And another reason is because I offend the women I admire most, which is the quilt women, the sewing women, whose fingers are tattered from pushing a needle, and they look at my stuff and go, Yuck.
Barbara: What do you hope to leave behind as your artistic legacy?
Penny: I guess one thing I like is that I'm untrained, and it leaves behind hope that any schmuck can make art. You don't have to have a degree from a school – you can just mess about and call it art. And I hope I broke some new ground. I know that women like me have broken new ground in the quilt world.
(For additional media coverage of Penny Sisto, click to www.scienceofmind.com)
