Three Sisters, 2024
Three Sisters is a hand-quilted textile sculpture containing heirloom seeds of corn, beans, and squash, plants traditionally grown together across the so-called Americas through a companion planting method known as the Three Sisters. Seeds from Jess’s own garden and ongoing agricultural apprenticeship are embedded within the seams of a delicate antique blouse, patchworked with used domestic fabrics. The work acknowledges the survival practices of displaced people who carried seeds to new lands, transporting with them sustenance, story, and continuity.
By returning corn to its companion crops, Three Sisters offers a quiet interruption to the isolating and fractured logic of industrial agriculture and monoculturing, restoring maize—however minutely—to a relational, living context.
172 cm x 147 cm. Naturally dyed used domestic textiles and clothing, sheep’s wool, cotton thread, corn, bean and squash seeds.
Presented as part of “Volution” at Shahin Zarinbal, Berlin
Curated by Shahin Zarinbal and Sinaida Michalskaja
Images by Eric Tschernow
Press
Mousse Magazine “Volution” at Shahin Zirinbal, Berlin