LIHU‘E — Somewhere between quilt number one and quilt number 24, Dean Jamieson of Lawa‘i learned, from the quilts themselves, really, that though they are his designs and his stitches, they never really belonged to him. So it was a
LIHU‘E — Somewhere between quilt number one and quilt number 24, Dean Jamieson of Lawa‘i learned, from the quilts themselves, really, that though they are his designs and his stitches, they never really belonged to him.
So it was a given that he would donate them to someone, someday, he said.
“Well, they belong to the people,” and there is no place better for the people (Kaua‘i residents and visitors) to see them than in the Kaua‘i Museum, “the Hawaiian quilt-friendly museum,” said Jamieson, 69.
So, while the formal paperwork transferring ownership of his works of art has not yet been signed, his 24 quilts have officially been physically transferred to the museum, and will be the focal points of the museum’s next quilt show, to open in October 2005, said Carol Lovell, museum director. “This collection will be the highlight of the show,” she said. A monthly lecture series is also planned.
Not bad for a guy who essentially taught himself how to sew, recalling the day not so long ago when his hands tired after just five minutes of the tedious work, and his stitches “were ragged and every which way. When I first started to sew, I couldn’t sew,” he says, showing proof in his first “practice quilt,” a 12-inch-by-12-inch piece included in the donation as a teaching tool. It shows stitching of uneven spacing on a floral design. “After one week, the stitches were not looking much better,” he admitted.
But he stuck with it, gifted with a steady hand and the determination to create his own works featuring native plants and animals after no other local quilter would agree to work on his designs. He came to a realization that if he didn’t create his own quilts with his own designs, no one else would, either.
Now, just 11 years after he began quilting, his work is museum quality, and at one show on O‘ahu a man whipped out a wad of U.S. currency asking an associate of Jamieson’s to essentially name his price for one of his pieces. They have never been and never will be for sale, in part because they aren’t his to sell, Jamieson said.
“This concept that this quilt is not mine” came during his quilting, which began in 1993 and continues today. If they were not his, he recalls asking himself, “whose were they? Ownership is shared by many,” he said.
The logical ownership answer became the Kaua‘i Museum, where Jamieson, a retired state Department of Health vector-control worker, plans to volunteer, in part to give back to his community and in part to be close to his other “children,” the quilts, he said.
Jamieson also volunteers at the National Tropical Botanical Garden at Lawa‘i Kai, where he got a lot of his inspiration for the native plants he stitches onto his quilts.
It takes him around one year to create a quilt, and he normally works on two at a time. “Every stitch is my own,” each stitch takes about a minute to complete, and his standard is to have 14 to 16 stitches per inch, he said.
The first 24 quilts are subjects of a book he has written that is being read by friends and others in its draft form.
The first of several quilts he shows on the day he delivered his large bags of rolled-up quilts to the museum is number five in the series, including an ‘ohi‘a lehua tree (Metrosideros collina), the ‘i‘iwi bird (scarlet Hawaiian honeycreeper, Vestiaria coccinea), and native bugs.
Jamieson, who lectures on his quilts in schools, explains that while use of floral patterns is traditional in Hawaiian quilting, his use of native trees, birds, plants and insects is “something new.”
The inclusion of the bugs is his way of converting art into teaching prop, and on every occasion possible he tells anyone who will listen about the interconnectedness of humans to forests to birds to everything living. As he says it, “acquainting people to know the forest and its spirituality.”
In the ‘i‘iwi quilt, the bird is not only the same color as the branch of the tree he or she sits on, but is connected in stitches, too, showing the interconnectedness of all things living, he explained. The work is his first attempt at using multiple colors.
While all his quilts have been shown in Kaua‘i Museum shows before, next year’s will mark the first time that all 24 will be on display at the same time.
It’s a shame, though, that they will be shown front-side out and likely mounted on walls and tables, as the backs of these works of art can and are, well, works of art in themselves. “Sometimes they’re fabulous,” he says of the backsides of many quilts, showing intricacies not observed when only the fronts are visible to viewers.
The quilts, if placed end to end, would span nearly half the length of a football field, and could easily be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars on the open market.
Bed-sized quilts commissioned by private individuals can sell for $10,000 to $40,000, and many of Jamieson’s works are around one-fourth the size of bed quilts.
Another of his favored ones, and the one that the other quilters ask him to show, he says, is one depicting Father Damien of Moloka‘i, the church of St. Filomena at Kalaupapa, the island of Moloka‘i, and the kukui, the flower of Moloka‘i, in each of the quilt’s four corners. There is also the logo of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary whose priests included Damien, and a cell of the shape of the organism that causes leprosy (Hansen’s disease).
But the real story of the quilt, he explains, is the background, going from deep blue at the bottom to a bright blue top, looking like a shining blue sky with lots of white clouds. “From darkness of despair to the heights of hope and salvation,” Jamieson says in his description.
Banana poka, number 20, finished in 2001, is very much a teaching tool, and the only one featuring an invasive species.
Finally, quilt 24, featuring the rare and endangered native hibiscus, Hibiscadelphus distans, and the pink bollworm, Pectinophora gossypiella, was completed this year, with hundreds of French knots used to portray the delicate points of pollen on the plant’s stamen.
The bollworm is a relative of an insect in part to blame for pushing the hibiscus to the edge of extinction due to his voracious appetite and lack of predators, he said.
Jamieson, comfortable talking about his creations but cognizant that he is only one of many quilters of Kaua‘i and Hawai‘i, points out on more than one occasion that his is only “one representation of many works of other quilters on this island, and throughout the state.”
Jamieson has five children, 16 grandchildren, and a great-grandchild, all in California.
Paul C. Curtis, associate editor, may be reached at 245-3681 (ext. 224) or mailto:pcurtis@pulitzer.net.
