Mary Catherine Lamb

Mary Catherine Lamb (March 12, 1949 – August 15, 2009) was an American textile artist, whose quilts reframed traditional Roman Catholic iconography.

Recycling vintage textiles popular during the mid-20th Century, she both honored and affectionately skewered her Catholic upbringing.

Mary Catherine Lamb, known as "MC" to her friends, was born March 12, 1949, in Oakland, California, into a devoutly Catholic family.

Her only sibling, Colette, was born three years later.

Lamb read voraciously as a child, a habit she continued all her life, and also kept a journal that by the time of her death ran to 22 volumes, filled with elaborate illustrations.

The Lamb sisters both attended St. Leo the Great Catholic School in Oakland, then went on to Oakland's Holy Names High School.

MC graduated in 1967 and attended Merritt College in Oakland the following year.

She left the Catholic church when she moved away from home to attend college.

In 1971, she married Richard Daley, a finish carpenter, and moved with him in 1972 to Portland, Oregon.

They divorced in 1978.

Clearing out the family home in Oakland after her mother's death in 1986, Lamb rediscovered religious objects of her girlhood.

She described being struck anew by the holy cards given to young Catholic children, and though long separated from the Catholic faith, she felt a resurgence of affection for these tokens of her childhood, recalling "the sense of promise, of security that the pictures of saints and angels imparted."

"I found a lot of Catholic mementos that really stirred me," she said years later.

"It was a revelation to me to realize I could embrace the images in a completely different way, on my own terms. It could incorporate playfulness and irreverence. But it also has a little bit of grief and yearning for the security of the past."

"While maintaining my decades-long rejection of the Church, I found that rather than feeling the old rebellious anger I’d long held for these images, I savored the intensity of nostalgia they stimulated. The irony inherent in these parallel responses didn’t escape me," she said.

Before long, choosing wall quilts as her medium, she would find herself drawn to "domestic textiles from the time when I believed and found comfort in the myths and symbols of the Catholic pantheon."

Around the time her mother died, Lamb enrolled in an art class at Marylhurst College taught by Portland art photographer Christopher Rauschenberg and multimedia artist Susan Banyas; the class explored the possibilities of translating life events into art.

One of her first projects was All My Hope, a small quilt honoring her mother who, despite youthful dreams of a singing career, instead became a social worker.

Rauschenberg was immediately impressed by her work: "I thought she was a terrific artist, thought her work was really great."

Cootie Quilt was the first quilt Lamb made that really felt like it was more than following an assignment, she said.

"All the fabrics in it are cut-up draperies or dishtowels or tablecloths. And I like how these cooties are funny in a way. I mean they’re comical, but they also have this kind of outer-space, menacing aspect. And it also got me started on the idea of doing a series of quilts based on the shapes of old toys."

In common with many traditional and contemporary quiltmakers, Lamb constructed her quilts with secondhand fabrics, "anticipating the recycled-art movement," as one critic put it.

In time, she would become known for her eccentric choices of materials in creating "wry narratives that blended Christian symbolism with social comment," her multileveled pictorial quilts "at once innocent and troubling, reverent and irreverent, serious and tongue-in cheek."

Lamb's first "religious" quilts impressed Rauschenberg by "the level of her craft, her vision, dealing with the religious imagery that can be traumatizing."

He became a friend who championed and promoted her work throughout the rest of her life and after her death.

In an unpublished artist's statement, Lamb described her inspiration for the "religious" quilts: "I thought of creating a Byzantine-like depiction of the Virgin Mary... the solemnity tempered by the unlikely combination of homely secondhand household fabrics and lush metallic. It seemed a revelation to me that I could embrace the imagery in my own way, and delight in it...I didn't have to reject the beauty of the compelling, magic, historical images of the saints and angels just because I intellectually reject the dogma of the powerful institution for which these lovely images are symbols."

She began using iron-on heat transfers of photographic images, a decision she described as "partly as a solution to drawing (or painting or embroidering or appliquéing) a believable face, but I was so struck by the almost eerie degree of humanity it lent to the piece that I have continued to rely on this method's power."

Like generations of quilt makers before her, Lamb used a familiar block construction process.

She began with a full size drawing of one or multiple images she wanted to include – then broke down the original composition into "essentially abstract units, unreadable by themselves," which would eventually "coalesce into the narrative only when pieced together."

Individual blocks completed, she would deliberately "fracture" the pieces so that they didn't fit neatly together, ultimately disjointing the images.

For Saint Anthony’s Torment, for example, a few squares were given a quarter-turn before being attached to the neighboring squares.

A few other squares were completely transposed, their positions switched entirely.

The process helped "to exaggerate the kinetic sense of these ‘moving pictures,’" the artist’s deliberate disjuncts in pattern alignment "introduc[ing] both motion and the notion of deconstruction of the subject."

In Saint Anthony's Torment, the viewer sees "an individual struggling to maintain his concentration in the face of diabolical distraction, clinging to faith and sanity while everything is spinning apart."

Lamb drew particular inspiration from the Book of Kells, an illuminated Gospel book believed to have been created c. 800 AD, whose illustrations embellished traditional Christian iconography with ornate, swirling motifs.

"I became enamored of medieval depictions of these stories," she wrote.

"[T]he flat, graphic quality of illuminated manuscripts . . . made them well suited for reinterpretation with two-dimensional textile work."

Rummaging through Portland's garage sales and thrift stores, Lamb emerged with raw materials, treasures to her thinking: cast-off mid-20th century curtains, tablecloths and garments.

These discarded fabrics would continue to reinforce memories of her Catholic childhood, "when certain religious images conveyed to me unquestioned order of the universe – with fond amusement not unlike my feelings for the holy cards themselves."

Among the silks, satins, brocades and metallics she gathered were "some hideous things I’d rather be shot in the foot than wear."