How quickly the skies clear

Hope Meng, *How Quickly the Skies Clear When We Pause,* 2022, linen and cotton blend fabric, wool batting, cotton thread. 60 x 60 in

Last night I attended a talk by San Francisco artist and graphic designer Hope Meng who is in town for the Bend Design conference. She discussed her concurrent exhibition at Scalehouse Gallery.

As per Scalehouse’s description, Meng’s work “challenges the instinct to decipher and construct meaning from written language. Toeing the line between legibility and abstraction, Meng uses design and fiber art to explore the edge of letterform and visual language.”

I was particularly captivated by Meng’s quilts, which employ her clever “typographic system based on the language of quilt blocks.” One quilt spells out the alphabet. The other spells out “How Quickly the Skies Clear When We Pause.” I’ve visited the quilt two separate times and found that, in order to see the words I had to let go of trying to read normally. I had to soften my gaze and let the words emerge - as if a sky were clearing of smog. The effect was mesmerizing and quietly moving.

According to her Instagram post about this piece, Meng wrote this phrase during the first year of the pandemic, “when the shock had settled a bit and the lucky/privileged among us were beginning to see the slightest glimmer of a silver lining. The skies had been a clear, stunning blue for weeks as cars were kept in garages and people walked everywhere because suddenly there was time to indulge such activities and the outdoors provided the only respite from shelter in our places.”

I’m meditating on Meng’s choice of material for her message. Quilts convey comfort, warmth, tradition, and handmade craft. I love the juxtaposition of the quilt’s rustic look and feel with the modern graphics. It makes the piece timeless. Though it stems from a moment in time, the message is not attached to any particulars. The clearing skies may reference one’s own internal weather or the power we have to stop polluting. The soft cotton suggests that we can approach new ways of seeing and operating with care and comfort. We don’t have to be shocked into pain. We can shift our gaze calmly, without going cold.

Meng mentioned an organizing principle for her current work. “Expanding within constraint,” she called it. For her this is a nod to the challenge of making time for making art while also parenting two young kids. But it’s also an acknowledgment of the freedom and creativity that comes when we establish boundaries around a thing - perhaps a delineation of time, or a specific theme, or a constraint of colors. The phrase made me think of my love of writing sonnets when I was a young poet in my 20s in New York City. I found that the constraint of the form sparked my creativity. Each poem was a chance to solve a puzzle, to make all the phrasing, rhyming, and rules work while still saying something evocative and unique.

Expanding within constraint also made me think of yoga, of course. But that takes me far away from typography and quilts. I mainly wanted to jot down a quick post here to encourage you to check out Meng’s work. There’s much more going on that I don’t have time to write about at the moment. Suffice to say, her work is her namesake - full of HOPE.

Recent art writing

Reverberations