Plea, Mary Anne Jordan; Andrew Carnie

Contributing to Junctures of a Haphazard Kind prompted textile artist and University of Kansas professor Mary Anne Jordan to muse on “the fragility of life yet the amazing resiliency of our bodies to regenerate and heal…especially since this work was done during the precarious and uncertain time of a pandemic.” In these pieces, she explores metaphorical links between textiles and the body. On the bottom, she relates the skilled handwork required to create domestic textiles like doilies, lace, and quilts to the complex structures of the body and dexterity required to perform surgeries; here, stitches function as sutures to repair and connect.
In the piece above, Jordan considers clothing not as a cover or protector, but rather as a disguise for the body. She deliberately chose transparent fabric to illustrate how close our flesh, blood, and organs are to the outside world. Here, clothing, imagined skin, and organs are all criss-crossed with thread and veins—words that themselves have strong links to lineage, family, and physical corporeality.