comes from a long line of quilters. Aaron is justifiably proud of this family legacy, which he has appropriated and used in a decidedly contemporary way.
"My family didn't really go to art museums or anything like that so in a lot of ways this was the creative outlet I saw most as a child." In his work Aaron explores the intersections between material culture, family tradition, identity-shaping, sexuality and desire in a range of works including quilts, collage, drawing, domestic textiles, furniture and sculpture.
Growing up in the mountains of East Tennessee, Aaron picked up
quilting, “almost like osmosis.” “Quilting resonates with me because of my
family connection,” he says. “I think of my practice as being always grounded
in quilt making, so whether it’s unit based piecework, or accumulation of
materials, or even some of the things that surround quilting, like hoarding
materials—I grew up around all of that. It’s important to me to both pay homage
to the people who came before and didn’t have the luxury or privilege to study
art, and also bring their traditions into the 21st century.”
Aaron is interested in how desire gets mediated through things and
what it is to learn about one’s desire, sexuality and romantic inclinations
through the printed word and visuals. He takes these and translates them into
his quilt and drawing studies. “Sometimes it’s very present, something lifted
directly from those sources and then turned into a quilt or the figure is maybe
removed and so you’re left with a background, or a silhouette, or a negative
space that indicates the figure. I’m interested in that movement from physical,
corporeal desire and also material desire. There’s always a reverence for the
materiality of the thing and patterns.”
Reinterpreted in brightly hued calico, the overtness of the
figures’ eroticism isn’t all that evident, but it hovers over the work. Aaron
likens these quilts to “strange baby blankets”. For him they play the role of
transitional object as described by psychoanalist Donald Woods Winnicott who posited that young children use objects (teddy bears, blankies) to separate the "me" from the "not-me". "I'm interested in making transitional objects that aren’t rooted in childhood, but rooted in
adult sexuality and eroticism,” he says. “In my own life, this means
transitioning out of certain ways of being romantically, sexually, into new
ways of being. I’m taking what those transitional objects represent together
with some hybrid of the child’s blankie into this new space of sexual
exploration.”
There’s an aspect of comfort that’s intrinsic to transitional
objects. In pairing this traditional, familial technique with gay erotica,
Aaron has found a way of uniting these two essential sides of his character.
Establishing a strong bond between them is the very definition of comfort.
Aaron hangs the quilts draped on a hook on the wall like rags, as
opposed to stretched out. “You’re going to be denied the image,” he says. But
the viewer will be invited to take them off the wall and hold them, to have a
physical experience with them and be able to spread them out so they can see
them.
In addition to fabric, Aaron works with printed materials and
erotica, piecing them together and doing drawings over them. He’s done large
room sized installations referencing the newspaper-covered walls of his
grandmother’s house as well as small-scale drawings. Pieced together and
featuring drawn stitches his drawings are symbolic quilts. “They provide a new
way of thinking about transitional objects that is very personal to me.”