For the story of my family, while I don’t know much of the specifics, I do know that coming from a mixed Asian-American background that I wanted to depict this visually using the black, white, and black/white squares.
What came to mind as I started with the layout was to create arrow shapes pointing in different directions to speak to my family moving in and out of their homelands - lots of transitions. Some black, some white, some mixed colors where different cultures came together.
I also liked the idea of creating a kind of compass in the middle to represent the idea of North, East, South, West because I have reason to believe that my ancestors were relatively diverse in their backgrounds - be it their respective cultures, religious beliefs, etc.
Lastly, when I stepped back from the piece to finalize it, I liked how there were two boat-like shapes in black facing away from each other over a kind of milagro heart. These shapes were unintentional, and yet when they caught my eye I felt assured I should stop playing with the squares and keep them as part of the overall narrative of movement, transition, and surely a bit of protection for me to be telling this story generations later.
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About Liberty Worth & "Where We Have Been & Where We Hope To Be"
Liberty Worth is a native of Los Angeles- a city of grit, diversity and great natural beauty. Influenced by the power of art and nature to soothe trauma and bring peace, she creates works that reflect natural wonder and quiet beauty from both new and discarded or repurposed materials. Where We Have Been and Where We Hope to Be is her current series of quilts created as a meditation on grief, hopes, and history in response to the murder of George Floyd and protests in 2020. She constructs these quilts using scraps of African fabrics in simple blocks.
She extended this practice and created a series of videos and materials from her own work and some of the materials from the Inbreak Residency - and pitched it to a small diverse group of friends and colleagues. The participants created works of their own. Each went through the steps of learning the materials (Session 1), mapping their heritage (Session 2), honoring their grief (Session 3) and investigating hope (Session 4). Digital artists turned the project digital, writers wrote profound statements and visual artists pushed boundaries. This is their work. Liberty’s quilts, their paper & digital quilts - some of which she has created back into quilts. Each artist has written a statement about their work.
