Fiber artist Rosie Rose, the daughter of a ceramicist and a batik artist, envisions the connection she still feels with her mother, Jenny Gies—who passed away when Rose was thirteen years old—as both circle and thread. Now a mother herself, the materials Rose contributed for this mask include the tank top she was wearing when she gave birth to her youngest daughter, Raven, during the COVID-19 pandemic. The tank top, “the first place Raven was held,” recalls an embrace, as does the yarn Rose contributed to the project. Using Montana corriedale and strips of one of Gies’s silk scarves—an abstract batik print that hung over Rose’s window as a curtain throughout her teenage years—Rose spun the yarn as a way of giving new life to a piece of her mother’s work. The process, she says, felt like protecting her mother’s work, and seemed especially powerful as a metaphor for the connection between mothers and daughters, both its warmth, “as the silk pieces are immersed in and wrapped by the wool like a hug” and its strength, “the way [the silk is] woven in...wrapped with all the little fibers, which hold it together.” For Rose, the combination of these materials offers a glimpse into the cycle of birth and death and the qualities—strength and warmth among them—one generation hopes to pass to the next.
