Working with untreated wool and stitching together scraps of second-hand fabric, Zamora-Turner melds metaphorical and tactile registers with her patchwork quilt. Making this blanket is a mode of piecing together her own personal and cultural histories, connecting the generations of British wool and cotton mill workers on her mother’s side with her Chilean roots on her father’s side, invoking the tradition of Arpilleras–bright, burlap textiles that depicted the brutal oppression of Pinochet’s military regime in a form of collective resistance disguised as folk embroidery. Zamora-Turner’s works with quilting is a mode of acknowledging and continuing the rich history of Andean textile traditions. The quilt is something of an offering to her father, dyed in varying shades of pink with madder root in allusion to the infamous pink walls of the Pisagua concentration camp in northern Chile, where he was detained as a prisoner during the dictatorship. The peachy tones also evoke the hues of Chile’s desert landscape, the color of the artist’s own skin, a feminine hue for this practice of quilting long relegated as women’s work. Zamora-Turner works through these many layers of inheritance, as she pieces together cuts of table linen, clothing and bedding that she sources from recycling centers in Poland, where she lives and works. Repurposing these discarded textiles, she regenerates what had been deemed waste, nodding also to a connection between Poland and Chile’s Atacama desert as two of the world’s largest receivers of fast fashion leftovers and textile waste.

Photographs by Marjorie Brunet Plaza

Bojące Wszystkich Krajów Łączmy Się - Galerie Molitor, March 2023
Wojciech Kosma, Mania Łukaszewska, Jess Zamora- Turner, The BWKŁS Choir

Press

Ewa Majewska for Blok Magazine "An Archive of the Weak? The Afraid of All Lands Unite"

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