blue Upholstery
Sewing & Fabrication
2024
Pittsburgh, PA

Upcycling discarded cushion foam, I made seat cushions for two benches that I built and reupholstered a found stool. Playing with the smaller, remaining pieces of blue canvas, I created a tote pattern and sewed a tote. Blue. Over the past year, maybe two, I’ve fallen further and further into a preoccupation with blue ~ color, hue,  l i g h t n e s s ~ I can’t tell if it feels more like a childlike obsession or love. A blue jacket in a crowd, chicory flowers growing around a stop sign in the narrow strip of dirt between the sidewalk and road… I’m pulled in until I’m immersed in a warm ocean of blue light that unfairly mutes all other colors. 

“It calms me to think of blue as the color of death. I have long imagined death's approach as the swell of a wave - a towering wall of blue. You will drown, the world tells me, has always told me. You will descend into a blue underworld, blue with hungry ghosts, Krishna blue, the blue faces of the ones you loved. They all drowned, too. To take a breath of water: does the thought panic or excite you? If you are in love with red then you slit or shoot. If you are in love with blue you fill your pouch with stones good for sucking and head down to the river. Any river will do.” -Maggie Nelson