Beldam Cloak

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Artist: Sonja Czekalski

Title: Beldam Cloak

Attribution: Beldam Cloak, 2021, Sonja Czekalski

Year: 2021

Materials: My grandmothers fabrics, my old bed sheets, yarn, embroidery floss, flax paper pulp, natural dyes, RIT dye, red wine, seaweed, assorted plants,pennyroyal herbs, human hair, and adhesive on handmade gampi paper.

Dimensions: 73" x 50" x 64"

Image Statement: Beldam Cloak is a portrait of my feminine ancestry. It is a garment, a painting, a tent, a time machine, a womb, and a hug from my grandmother. The cloak is constructed of fragments from her fabrics embedded into skin like paper, along with scraps of my old bedsheets. In doing so, I have stitched together a map of my maternal lineage. The cloak is colored with natural dyes, coated in layers of paper pulp, seaweed, and dried pampas grass. The natural materials connect my personal genealogy to the roots of our physical and spiritual descent from Mother Earth. The bodily materiality of the cloak represents the raw beauty of stretch marks, laugh lines, and the organs that grow, change, and nourish a new life in the sacrifice of one’s own. The raw and visceral cloak encompasses the complexity of motherhood, mother daughter relationships, and the representation of the intense changes a woman's bodies can survive.