Webster Library Exhibitions

Shaping Grief: Quilt and Book

May 1 – August 1, 2025

Webster Library LB-2 vitrines

We invite you to experience Shaping Grief: Quilt and Book, an exhibition featuring the work of Abby Maxwell. Through textiles and books, Maxwell explores grief as a material and structural presence—unbound by language yet deeply embedded in memory and decay.

"The collection presented here engages closely with materialities of loss, decay, waste, and remains, made with rust mordants; the pigments of barks, fallen leaves, and grief herbals; the heap of cloth scraps remaining from my own textile practice; pages of disintegrating books on street corners; the silk fluff returning milkweed seeds to the ground. These works attempt to inhabit the form of grief, not to speak its name or tell its story, but to take part in its movement as an essentially limitless and unrepresentable force. I am interested in what is made possible by the forms of the quilt and the book. I consider both techniques of containment as modes of being with the structure of grief–a structure of sheer ineffability; beyond language, beyond narrative, and beyond memory. Both quilts and books tend to be taken up as vessels for these very notions: they contain and maintain information that is meant to carry memory (history, tradition) into the future. Yet, they are assemblages of bound fibre–they are essentially fleeting; bound for decay." -- Abby Maxwell.