A Collective Autobiography

Coulter Fussell

in Conversation with

Jeanette McCune

Jeanette McCune, Director of Cleo the Project Space, curated Coulter Fussell's latest exhibition, Pillow Talk at Atlanta Contemporary, and recently sat down with the artist to talk about her creative process.

Hailing from Columbus, Georgia, Coulter is the youngest in a lineage of family seamstresses, whose unique approach involves using primarily discarded and donated materials and turning them into intricate quilt-works. Drawing from an array of donated items — from shower curtains to t-shirts — each piece carries its own history, its own aura of nostalgia, creating connections that are equally humorous and profound. McCune and Fussell discuss the meaning of being a working artist in the South, the role of tradition in making, and the surprises that come from accidental donations.

Jeanette McCune: Can you talk about what your family history has meant for your practice and the way that you work – what did your parents do and how did that influence you?

Coulter Fussell: My early introduction to art was through my parents, and that played a vital role in how I became an artist, and the approach that I took to art. My mother is a very gifted lifelong quilter who started out like many her age did, as a “traditional,” quilter.

My father was a museum curator and folklorist, so he specialized in local arts that were coming out of folk traditions. That would be anything from iron works to quilting to basketry to lots of musical traditions – and all of this was in the setting of a fine arts museum.

So all of the craft traditions – and what would be considered higher art traditions or practices – were in the same environment and in my household, and were given the same level of importance. One wasn't better than the other or more esteemed than the other. In fact, in my household, craft might have been a little bit more looked upon as something to really admire, because of the combination of aesthetic and function.

So that would later manifest in my artwork, because that's exactly what I'm trying to do – I'm trying to graft these various art forms together in a democratic way, to make a new form where neither what someone would consider fine art or what someone would consider craft is above or below in esteem. They are just combined together in this whole new form.

That's really where my parents’ presentation of art came in and manifested for me. But really, on a practical level, my mom taught me how to sew and my dad taught me how to appreciate artwork. As he's a folklorist, there's a lot of history there – knowledge of history and local history.

I'm really into knowing where everything came from, knowing why people did this or why people did that. Those sorts of narratives are in my work as well.

JM: When did you start quilting? When was that kind of shift – when did you start, and when did you decide to fully commit to the practice? I think it's important to point out that you were waitressing for a while and then you decided to quit and do your practice full time.

CF: Yeah, there's a real path there. As straight a path as any art path is – it's all meandering. But I made my very first quilt with my mother when I was in late high school, maybe early college. I was probably around 19, and I made it with her, which is so funny because she made her first quilt when she was 19.

And my mother’s quilt is just this incredible – like beautiful, perfect quilt, and she did it all on her own, and then I made these quilts… anyway, she let me get into her white oak basket, which was filled with scraps. And, you know, I was like “Mom, I want to make a quilt,” and she knew I was going to make something off the wall.

So she let me do it my way. And when I was done with piecing the top, I held it up and all these pieces fell off. It didn't work, you know? And she was like, “In quilting, there's an order of operations. You have to do things in a certain order or else it just won't work, and it won’t function. So I'm going to let you do it your crazy way, but then I'm going to teach you the actual steps that make it function and work as a quilt,” and that is exactly what she did. So I never had that point which some quilters may go through, where they have to break out of what they consider a stricter tradition.

I sort of started there and was encouraged to start there, because I had a mom who already knew all the rules and knew how to apply them to my work. So I sort of always existed a little bit on the outside there. But yeah, I was in early college, late high school when that happened, and I eventually wound up at the University of Mississippi.

That's the third college I went to, to get a BFA. I graduated from the University of Mississippi, and that same week got my waitressing job at Ajax Diner on the Oxford Square in little bitty Oxford, Mississippi. I waitressed there, for the most part, for the next 20 years.

During that time, I was painting, I was drawing in the early years, I would have art shows and put the paintings up at restaurants. We would rent buildings and have art shows in buildings that we'd put on ourselves. At one point after I had my first kid, I started a little ten-foot-wide gallery in an old barbershop with one of my closest friends [Yalo Studio in Water Valley, Mississippi], and we did that for like five years.

JM: That’s fun, that's something new that I didn't know about you.

CF: Yeah, it was like ten feet wide, twenty feet long, with little little studios in the back. And that’s where I started sewing. I had a lot of old fabric scraps that I'd been hoarding for years, lots of old clothes that I’d had since I was a child. I was painting figures, but it gnxvhn was always girls who had dresses on, and I'd spend all this time painting the textiles, you know.

And anyway, I sort of eventually started going over to quilting, or at least working with textiles, because the girl I had the gallery with – Megan Patton, who’s still one of my closest friends in the world, I waitressed with her for years – she really got into quilting. And so then she and my mom were talking about quilting and I was like, “Well, I want to talk about what y'all are talking about.”

Anyway, it just all sort of rolled on from there. And there was a point in about 2015 where I had started to make a lot of quiltwork at that little ten foot wide gallery. I was showing a lot of other people's work, and you know, ten feet wide isn't very wide for a quilt maker.

JM: And who knew that one day, you would just have bags and bags of fabric?

CF: I had this summer Residency at Yalo Studio, where along with this woman I knew from New York [Mary Lapides], we would invite artists down to come spend two or three weeks in Mississippi and have a show at this little gallery. [the Lapides/Pinehurst Summer Residency at Yalo Studio]

And so just at the right time, the right New Yorker saw one of my quilts and was like, “We have a quilt show in New York, and I want you to be in this show. There are supposed to be 12 quilters in the show and one dropped out. And I love this quilt.”

Her name is Kiva Motnyk, and she runs Thompson Street Studio. And she was like, “I would love if we had your quilt –”

JM: Oh my God! you know what, this is so weird! Okay, Coulter, now we're getting off the rails because when I used to work for Textile Arts Center [Brooklyn, NY], we used to do a lot of work between our center and Thompson Street Studios. And then I think that quilt show – was there a Mariah Gillespie? She’s a fellow Oklahoman. She didn't go to school with me, but she was friends with my best friend in high school. And so we’d all hang out. But damn, this world is fucking small.

CF: I had her work in my slide show yesterday for my workshop episode – I was like “Here's Mariah Gillespie.”

JM: She's pretty incredible. It's been a really long time since I've seen her in person. But her quilts are incredible.

CF: Yeah, so we had a show, and Mariah was in it – and that was the first time that anybody outside of my family had ever been like, “that’s a good quilt.” You know, I mean, I only made like two, and then it was in a show in New York because this person just happened to see it at the right time. I mean, it was built on tons of art efforts I had done for years – you just never know in art when things like that wind up being the thing –

JM: – when you’re gonna get your break.

CF: Yeah, I mean, if I had never painted, if I had never opened this little ten foot wide gallery, I would have never met Kiva. So although it was like the first or second quilt I'd ever made on my own – I made it for my first born son. And then I sold it because, you know, quilters are broke. He doesn't care, he’s a 16 year old boy.

So I was like, “Okay, well, maybe I'll just sew more.” So in 2015, I rented a space three doors down from my little gallery – it’s the studio I'm in now. I rented it with Kiva with the intention to sell vintage fabric. Well, I realized after a while that people were dropping off all this old fabric and no one was buying it, because nobody wanted it but me. I realized it wasn’t actually functioning as a store, it was functioning as, like, a drop off point for everybody's old shit. And it was everything.

And so, eventually I was just in that studio, and that's where I've been ever since. And I just went totally over to textiles, to do what I could never really get a grasp of in painting. And that was like this sort of full art experience, as the artist. I was able, in textiles, to completely express what I was trying to express, and have it really manifest into something thorough and complete. I was never quite able to get there in painting.

JM: Let's touch down on that – the fact that all of your materials are secondhand and donated to your studio. Why is that important? Do you want to elaborate on that a little bit?

CF: Yeah, so there are two main reasons that I use old fabrics. One is very pragmatic – it’s free. It doesn’t cost money, and that is a huge factor. As I said earlier, I was a waitress until 2020. I mean, when I was opening both studios – the little ten foot gallery and the textile studio – that whole time I was waiting tables, I was raising babies, and so money was a big deal.

So the freer the supplies, the better. And also, you know, on top of that, there's just the sort of human element to used textiles. There is the story that comes with it. If you think about used textiles in terms of a sort of human archeology, you get these clues to what may have happened before in the textiles. And in that way, half of what I am doing in terms of content for the work has already been dictated to me, you know, it's already there.

I don't make up too much stuff, because it's already been supplied for me. And so I really like the faded nature of used textiles, and that I've got to work with what I have. And that's sort of what the universe has told me to do, you know, by having this stuff land on my doorstep for whatever reason. And I think that at the base of that is sort of a real craft mentality, because I think that craftspeople are ultimately incredibly resourceful. I think that's part necessity, and part an artistic appeal and pull.

JM: Right, totally. The sustainability of it all – you're always thinking about “reduce, reuse” when it comes to your work. And that comes with a plethora of deeper concerns about labor, making these fast fashions and making these textiles.

CF: Yeah. You know, the material made me that way. I didn't come to this thinking, “You know what? I'm going to use these supplies because it's good for planet Earth.” I would actually – to be real honest – do it this way, even if it was a little bit bad for planet Earth. Because I really like making my art this way.

But that's not the reality of it. The reality of it is - and I know this, because I live and work every day in this studio that is filled top to bottom, till the point where you can barely move, with this fabric we throw away for no reason. We don't need to produce another piece of fabric ever in the history of the world.

So when I live and work in that for hours and hours every day; it makes you so incredibly hyper-aware of our impact there. So I want to make sure that – I didn't go into this with those notions at all, but now it's so unavoidable to work and not see that, not see the labor issues, not see the waste issues. You cannot work with these materials to the level that I do and not have that become a major factor in how you relate to your artwork, because it is just real clear.

JM: Right. Totally. Well, and then talking about your general approach to the work, nostalgia is incredibly important to you, and incredibly important to when you talk about specific pieces.

So, what is nostalgia to you? What is so important about the colors and the textures and the patterns that you find in these pieces that relate back to something that you can remember, or that you want to hold on to?

CF: Yeah, well, I mean, these pieces are really sort of a collective autobiography, if that's even a thing. But it's my stories mixed with other people's stories. And, you know, often they will look nostalgic because I'm dealing primarily in old fabric; the fabric I'm getting is thrown away. So it's what people don't want now. So, you know, it might be out of style. It might be from a couple of decades ago because it's finally to the point where it's thrown away. So it's not necessarily nostalgic by intention, it’s nostalgic because that's just what I wind up getting, stuff that’s older.

But also, I really feel like the past isn't even past. What happened before us is all still very present. So if a piece of fabric is from the ‘80s, that to me is still a present part of who I am, and who we all are. I don't really see time in this linear way; it's more like layers that build up on top of each other.

JM: Right. It's not like a chapter closes – it's like, no, no, no, everything's just a rolling ball that just collects things.

CF: Yeah. And so in that way, I like to put fabric from the 1980s – which is a decade I remember – with fabric from just yesterday, and then along with fabric from the 1880s, 1860s – which is about as early a fabric as I have. And that’s this time period where there can’t be nostalgia for any of us; we don't know, we weren't there. But there's this assumed nostalgia; that we think we might know what it was like or whatever. I like to mix all that stuff in together.

JM: Totally. And humor, why is that important? I think that some of your stuff is pretty funny and really light. And you can feel that when you are present in the work. I mean, with the giant heart emojis and the sequins, all of that stuff.

CF: Well, I think that some of the best self reflection you can do is when you're self-deprecating. And I think that you can't make fun of another person unless you make fun of yourself first.

So if you do have a critique for somebody else, you can critique yourself, critique them, then can critique yourself again. I think that's a way you can present critique to others without being cruel or harmful or, you know, senseless about it.

And I also love humor. I mean, I think it's a great social commentary. I grew up a comic book kid. I loved comics. I loved cartoons. I like funny things and funny people. And so I think that cartoon, comic book sort of social commentary comes into play with me.

You know, I loved Pogo Possum cartoons. I loved to go into the A&P grocery store and sit in there reading comic books, Laffy Taffy jokes – all that fun stuff when you're little and you’re learning. Comedians and funny people are the smartest people out there. Everything's so serious. And the smartest thing you heard or read all day was in MAD Magazine. And I mean, our whole experience here is sort of horribly and belovedly absurd. So I try to capture that in my pieces, in that they’re sort of hyperbolic in their intensity and cartoon-esque playfulness.

JM: So, I want to talk about the show at Atlanta Contemporary, [Pillow Talk, Jan - May 2024]. Do you want to talk a little bit about the theme that developed in the work, and what it became in the total body of work?

CF: Yeah, so for a little bit, I had been working with these cut and sew dolls: they're these craft panels that you can use to make a quick pillow. Usually it's a cartoon character, and you cut it out, and all you have to do is sew one seam around the edge and it makes a pillow of a duck or whatever. So for the patterning for that, you get this pre-built cartoon duck, where you see the front of the duck and the back of the duck – so you’ve got this sort of double image.

So I wanted to use these things, because I have a bunch of them in the studio of various animals and dolls or whatever. But they're all double sided, you know? So I was going to have to work with symmetry.

That's not something I usually do. I'm not very symmetrical in my personal quilting tradition. I grew up in the ‘80s and ‘90s, when that wasn't our aesthetic to be down the straight and narrow or whatever.

So I was like, okay, how do I work with symmetry so that I make the symmetrical part be what's weird, and what’s not normal? I wanted to make symmetry the bizarre part of it. And so I combined that with this notion of furniture headboards because furniture is often – not all the time, obviously – but, symmetrical.

And I wanted the furniture to be close to the quilt. So the quilt’s on the bed, the bed’s the furniture. So I made these headboard screens and took the cut and sew dolls and used them as the ornate part of the furniture to show the symmetry.

And so anyway, I sort of wound up with these really weird, surreal things that are supposed to be headboards, I guess. But they're like screens, TV screens into inner worlds and dreams and desires. You know, stuff that you think about or talk about at night, under your quilt, in your bed, to yourself or with another person, you know – the pillow talk of life.

JM: In some of the pieces there's this sensuality, this kind of sexiness, but it’s kind of absurd, weird sexiness. And then there are these moments where – the one that I can't stop thinking about, of course, is the survival t-shirt – you having a nightmare about being caught up in a tornado, and then you get a t-shirt that's like, “I survived a hurricane/tornado,” and that's on there in one of the pieces now. Can you speak to a couple of your favorite moments in the show? I mean, now I'm just talking about mine, but another one of my favorite moments was when you had ordered that printed photo on fabric and you got the wrong one. That was so good to me. I was like, “this is wild.”

CF: It's so funny. So for this other series I'm doing, I've been taking my dad's old 1970s Kodachrome slide film of wildflowers – local wildflowers from the region I'm from in West Central Georgia – and then getting them printed on fleece, like pink fleece. And I was running a test for that – I wanted to test it real quick to see if it would work.

So I just used one of those – I normally wouldn't do this – but I used one of those quick overseas companies that’s just going to ship it to China, some machine over there is going to make it, and put it on a freaking boat and send it all the way back. And my plan was, if this works, then I'll do it for real for the artworks in a different way. I didn't want to spend all that time and money if it wasn’t going to work. So I get this thing done, I send off for this fleece blanket with all these square images of my dad’s wildflowers on it, so that I could test and see if it worked. Instead, I get back a blanket of somebody’s various pictures of their honeymoon trip to Mount Rushmore.

It's this cute couple taking selfies with Mount Rushmore in the background. There is one picture on the blanket of just a buffalo in the road. And so I was like, “this is just absolutely fated. This is like the greatest donation ever.” And I used the clouds in one of the photos over Mt. Rushmore as the clouds in the title piece of the show, Pillow Talk.

So it was so funny, because I had already sort of planned what I was going to name the show, and what it was going to be about. And then I get this honeymoon couple’s trip. So, I actually used some clues in those photos to try to find these people to be like, “Hey, I've got your blanket.”

He worked at a concrete place in Wisconsin; I deduced that because of the hat he was wearing in sev-eral pictures, but I never got really down to who exactly they were – and also by then, I had cut up the blanket.

But I do wonder who got my dad's wildflowers. The slides are beautiful, but they're just haphazardly and randomly put on this fleece blanket, because I was just going to cut them out anyway, so –

JM: Right. Somebody got it and was like, “What the hell is this?” But I think that’s such a lovely translation of what we’ve talked about with your work, that collective remembering, and then you got this total mystery of these people's story. And I love that it's very Americana, like “we're at Mount Rushmore and we’re having a photo in front of Mount Rushmore.”

CF: I mean it’s exactly like a normal donation to my studio.

JM: In so much of the work, there are these touchstone moments, either a cartoon character or the “I Survived” t-shirts, the iconography of that; these moments where the audience can find themselves in the work – which I think is really important, and a lovely portrait of American life, so to speak.

CF: Well, that's how clothes are – especially when it comes to t-shirts. Ever since the 1970s, everything that's ever happened to us has been documented on a t-shirt. You know, even every food – the number of barbecue joint t-shirts I have is crazy. You know, it wouldn't be that way if my studio was somewhere else.

Like “I Survived a Hurricane” t-shirts; it’s so regional in a lot of ways. And then you have layers of fabric that reach out further to more people. And what you realize after all this – going through all these fabrics and stuff – is we're all the same. The details will change, but we’re all doing the same things. We're putting on t-shirts from the place we like to eat; we're driving to work in our dress pants, if that’s what we wear, or a uniform, if you’re like me. And then you come home and you go under the quilt, you go to bed, and you dream. I mean, everybody does that. You can see it in clothes.

JM: So a couple of things about your process - everything’s hand-sewn. Why is that important? Why does it have to be hand-sewn?

CF: It has to be hand-sewn because there's different types of fabric, you couldn't run it through a machine. Especially now when I'm sewing onto panel – it’s wrapped in wool batting. I can’t run any of that through the machine. I have to hand-sew through the top layers. But I think hand-sewing has a lot of benefits anyway.

JM: There are artists who approach the work with a route in mind, and know what they're going to attack and how they're going to do it. And then there are artists who just make, and kind of figure it out along the way. And I definitely think that you fall into that category. You’ve been very frank in the daily conversations that we've had – that that's kind of how you work, and there's no end point that you're trying to reach.

As you figure these problems out along the way, then that's great. But it's also not necessary for the work, you finding answers to these questions that you have.

CF: I'm not answer oriented at all. I'm not searching for answers to anything. And I'm not trying to tell anyone an answer. I'm not trying to be like, “here's what you should think about this,” because I don't know what you should think about it. I only know what

I think about it. And even then I'm not totally sure, you know? Even then I’m sort of like, what do I think about this, or do I think anything about it? So no, it's all real process oriented for me. I'm not too interested in concrete answers or anything.

JM: Let’s talk about the importance of being in your small city in Mississippi, and what that means to the work itself. I mean, we've talked about Americana, American landscape – and you're definitely in the depths of it with your small city in the South. Do you feel like that's something that the work has grown from? Or that it doesn't have anything to do with it, and it's just the place you decided to settle?

CF: It's almost entirely dependent on being here, because I can afford a studio. I can’t afford a studio even in the next town. But because I live in a 3,400 person town, I can afford to have a big studio, and so my work gets to be big as well.

And also because we live in a rural area, people have a lot of stuff, because there's a lot of room in rural areas. They have a lot of intergenerational stuff that gets passed down. And I mean, this is people of all socioeconomic levels. They’ve got lots of shit. And so I wind up with a lot of stuff. Not many people here are crammed into real tiny apartments on top of each other where they can only have a few items.

So it's very much a material world, and a material world that lasts for generations. And it's affordable. And also, I’ve never had the option to be anywhere else. This is where my family is – this is where my family has been since it was around. So it’s been a long, long time.

I've never had the opportunity to move anywhere else. And I don't know if I would or not. But, I was in an article in Art in America called Staying South. Logan Lockner wrote it, and he was asking a few artists why they stayed down South.

Logan asked several artists why they stay South or return South to be artists when there's New York and all this other stuff. And by the end of the article, one of the things he comes to is, they just have family there. That's where their family is; they can’t leave their family. And I think that's a huge part of it. I'm just from here.

One of the things that I really like about being in a very, very small town, or at least down South, and being an artist is that there is no precedent set. So no one's going to tell me no; I just do it.

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