Transitional Object
Something I have made.
I took Art in my last year of high school. I’m immensely proud of my final piece, Transitional Object, and I wanted to share why it means so much to me.
My exploration started when I wanted to combine my love of quilting and embroidery, a skill that is very personal to me as my mum taught me, with my personal journals and, by extension, perspectives on the world throughout my childhood. I wanted to create a functional quilt that expressed my transition from youth to adulthood. I was passionate about the historical underappreciation of textiles and the community it fostered for women as they were confined to it.
Transitional objects are those blankets, soft toys, and bits of cloth to which people develop intense, persistent attachments. This piece represents my transition from childhood in the physicality of a comforting quilt. Physically, it looks like a transitional object, representing years of change. From a distance, the quilt is a pixelated self-portrait, but as you come closer, the individual tiles resolve into scanned pages from my journals, sketchbooks or diaries, which I have kept since I was five or six. This convergence of hiding my appearance while inviting a viewer into my private thoughts and feelings embodies the conflicting nature of my evolving self-identity. The name encapsulates the theme of creating a self-portrait at this stage of my life. My schooling was ending, and my journals document the moments as well as the years that have shaped me.
It took a long time sorting through the pages and pages of documentation I have kept. The cathartic experience of seeing my whole childhood written out took a long time. I didn’t scan every page for my quilt as some things were too personal to have hanging up in my high school for anyone to have a gander at, but I did have to put in a lot to have enough tiles. I got them all printed on a large piece of fabric and used my machine and hand embroidery to transform them into a quilt.
The quilt’s interwoven and stitched component reinforces themes of interconnection and memory. The soft texture is comforting, yet it contrasts with the struggles and emotions I have confided in my journal, highlighting the tension between external presentation and internal experience.
The moody, muted colours convey suppressed emotions, while the pixelation dares the viewer to judge what I refuse to expose. Despite allowing access to my inner thoughts, there is always more to know to understand a whole person, which is reflected in the empty or unreadable tiles. The piece's scale creates a dominant and emotionally provoking effect, confronting the viewer with the sheer size of a lifetime’s experiences. I was inspired by Tracey Emin's textiles and personal experience in Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–1995. The juxtaposition of traditional quilts with the digital world explores a new way of storytelling within a historically narrative-driven medium.
Pixelation is significant in contemporary times, tied to the ability to distort and conceal. I used pixelation to obscure myself while simultaneously revealing my inner thoughts. The way the journal pages are exposed while the image itself remains blurred challenges the curated self-image often presented on social media, where depth and personal investigation are rarely prioritised. The central phone also turns the gaze back on the viewer. I’m observing them as they observe me, reinforcing how perception shapes identity.
The quilt is immortalised in this exact period of time, on the cusp of high school graduation. It represents the accumulation of experiences that make up a person in one moment before more tiles would theoretically need to be added.
A wonderful piece. Very well done.