Interview with Penny Sisto

Karen Musgrave (KM): This is Karen Musgrave and I'm conducting a Quilters' S.O.S. - Save Our Stories interview with Penny Sisto. Penny is in Floyds Knobs, Indiana, and I'm in Naperville, Illinois, so we're conducting this interview over the telephone. Today's date is December 31, 2009 and it's now 1:06 in the afternoon. Penny thank you so much for taking time out of your day to do this interview with me. Please tell me about your quilt "Queen Bee Colony Collapse."

Penny Sisto (PS): I'm a thrift store, antique store comber as most quilters are and I was combing through my favorite thrift store, which is Unique Thrift Store in Louisville, Kentucky and it's in the west end and you never know what you'll find. I found 200 year old French lace there and I found plastic shopping bags that I cut apart and used them in a quilt. I picked up about 36 inch square piece of, I think it's an upholstery fabric and I thought it just had random gold dots on it but when I got it home and washed it, I realized they were bees and that very morning I had gotten an email from a friend of mine about her bee hive colony collapsing and how heartbroken she was and it seemed to me that the spirits had moved to put the bee fabric into my hands. I visualized the queen bee and what she would have felt as the hum of the old ones and the working ones grew faint. The first symbol that came into my mind was baldness and so I made the queen bee bigger in the middle of this quilt bald as you would be if you had taken chemotherapy, because whatever was poisoning the bees is also poisoning us. They are our present day canaries in a coal mine. In the middle of the queen bee's forehead is a stencil in gold of a bee. In her breast as you go down in the quilt I painted and then quilted giant bee figures and in place where her hair would be I was originally going to do white quilt thread and then I realized, nope I wanted the quilt to take on a three-dimensional part, I often do that. I made a little six sided honeycomb up on the left of the quilt that almost looks like my grandmother's sewing basket. Out of it I poured some honey and the honey ran down and kind of gummed up and by three days later it was almost gone so I thought honey won't do it and then I poured some bees wax, melted bees wax and poured that out of the honeycomb. That looked beautiful and smelled wonderful mixed with the honey, but as soon as I jostled and moved the fabric of the quilt it cracked and sheered off. So then, because I love to invent new things, I warmed up some more bees wax, poured some honey into it and poured some Gorilla Glue into it and then molded that over my honeycomb and it worked [laughs.] perfectly. It is about as strong as Gorilla Glue can get. It seems of bees wax and where the Gorilla Glue made little foam bubbles it is honey trapped in so I got the best of all worlds. Because I got slap happy with the melted bees wax I dribbled it down her forehead to make it look like hair. I wish you could smell the quilt because I'm a sniffer. I'm part bloodhound and when you smell it you can smell the honey vapors and the bees wax. It's a very simple quilt.

KM: Is this typical of your style?

PS: You know I like to do three-dimensional things from time to time. She, the queen bee herself, is typical of my style. The honey is not. I've used strange things in quilts before. The strangest thing I guess is human bone and probably the second strangest, mouse mummy. I didn't kill the mice because I'm a pacifist, I don't even like killing bugs, but when I turned--I'm 68 [years old.] now. When I turned 50, I have seven kids from my body and two step kids and they tell me that I'm very difficult to get presents for because I don't like seeing very much. My house is small so I don't like the fashions very much but they found the ideal thing. They were up in the attic and they found my old butter churn and in it these three mice had fallen and mummified. It was really sad, but fortuitous for me because for my 50th birthday they gave me the mummy mice and I put them on the quilt about the nuclear time clock, how close we are to nuking each other. It became a quilt that I called "Three Blind Mice." I kept it quite a while for me. I kept it a few months before it sold.

KM: What are your plans for "Queen Bee Colony Collapse"?

PS: There is a Jewish community center/gallery in Louisville, Kentucky, and I'll open a small show with about 17 quilts there in January and I'm calling the show "Survivors." He will go in the "Survivors" show.

KM: This quilt is 32 inches by 22 inches. Is that a typical size for you?

PS: Oh my no, I do like to work large. The largest quilt I've made hangs in the Abbey of Gethsemani where Thomas Merton, to those who know his writings. He was Seven Storey Mountain and lots of other books. That was his monastery and they have my largest and I believe it's 28 foot long and about 22 foot wide. It's a large living Christ quilt. My favorite size to do a quilt is about five foot by four foot.

KM: Why is that you favorite size?

PS: Because I can hold it up to myself. I don't measure things very much. That's why my quilts are always so wonky and off centered, but I can hold it up to my height plus a little bit and that's the size. It just suits my body size. It feels comfy.

KM: Tell me about your interest in quiltmaking.

PS: I'm an accidental quilter in that my grandmother who raised me--I'm obviously not from Kentucky. [referring to her accent.] I'm from the Orkney Islands off the northern most corner of Scotland. My granny reared me and she made quilts for markets and once a month she would take little patchwork things in to sell and as soon as I grew old enough to wield a sewing needle she would teach me Nine Patch. I would make that, but by age seven I rebelled and began to incorporate dragons and my grandmother's face and sea birds and the old stories of the Celts into quilts. At first, she would wield a whip when I did it and then she sold one or two and decided that was okay. That's how I kind of fell into doing what I do now.

KM: Tell me about your creative process.

PS: That's a strange question for me because I think like a lot of artists, not just quilt artists, my eyes linger on things, on shadows, on tree bark. Like I'm looking out, I live in the middle of the woods and I'm looking out at the bark now and I see figures in it and landscapes and I rarely carry--I own a camera but I rarely carry a camera so I will write it into my mind so that when I get home I can put that face I saw or that landscape I saw down into fabric. I don't draw it. I'm not very good at drawing, I just start cutting fabric.

KM: How many hours a week do you work on quilts?

PS: I work seven days a week. I give myself two weeks off every summer and I don't take work with me to the ocean. I take all my kids and grandkids to the ocean for two weeks. I just belong to them then, I don't work. I work seven days a week and I get up at 4:30 and I go to bed at about 10:30 and the whole time if I'm not seeing to family affairs or animals or rehabbing or gardening or cooking, [laughs.] I'm sewing or dyeing fabric. Pretty much all I do.

KM: What does your family think of your quiltmaking?

PS: When they were young they thought they were weird and embarrassing and now they're older and they still think a lot of them are weird but I think they gradually, somewhere around age twenty got proud of me. Several of them they do art but in different ways. My son, John, writes poems. Bethany makes clothing for children. My oldest daughter embroiders. They each picked it up. Some of the boys make things out of steel. One boy is an actor. The arts brushed off onto them against their will. [KM laughs.] Yes.

KM: Is there any part of quiltmaking that you don't like? Any aspect?

PS: The sneezing. [both laugh.] The dust, [laughs.] from pulling the batting. Yes that is the only thing. I really do love it a lot.

KM: That's great.

PS: I wouldn't love it if I had to measure and do straight lines because I'm very bad at that. I do own a ruler somewhere but it's probably bent by now.

KM: Describe your studio to me.

PS: Studio is too fancy a name for it. We live in a log cabin made out of cedar logs that I foolishly thought would keep moths out of my fabrics. [laughs.] The old ones would also said that cedar stop moths from getting in your hosiery and your clothing, but we have moths [laughs.] every summer and spring. It's small. It's in the middle of a 400 acre woods. The studio is simply the room in it with the best light that I kind of stole. It started off to be a bedroom and then I thought that was a waste of light and gradually I took it over like a hermit crab and called it my own. It's got a fairly high ceiling. Its light isn't very good given that we're in the woods and I have four florescent bulbs in it. When I turned 60, my son built shelves for it and very simple. The floor is marble. It looks like a quilt made of marble scrapes because Orkney everything still had stone, the floors, the window seats, the old cross like the house I grew up in. My spirit aches for the rock of our houses so Richard said, 'I'll make you a marble floor throughout the house.' And then he priced marble and we could afford about two square feet of it, so we drove home feeling sad and then passed a place that makes vaults and funeral art, it's a graveyard and they had a huge scrap pile in the back yard and we went and said, 'How much for your scrap pile?' And he said, 'I'll pay you $300 to move it.'

KM: Oh. [laughs.]

PS: So it did all the floors in the house and the kitchen floor in a friend's home. It has a marble floor and a worktable, a huge longarm machine that's pretty old and ratchetty now and a fast sewing machine.

KM: Do you use your longarm?

PS: Yes, I love it. I used to do hand quilting but then I got old and I got greedy about time so then I started machine quilting.

KM: Have you ever used quiltmaking to get through difficult times?

PS: I think daily. [both laugh.] Yes, every day. Yeah, my gosh, yes, especially as a child because I grew up in a household that was very violent. It was a tiny little place but in that tiny house was a grandfather, a great-grandmother, a grandmother, a great uncle, an uncle, myself and the cow herding man, Malcolm who come to that farm as an orphan when he was 11. The house would fit in our living room here. It was a place of unspeakable horrors and I would find places to sit and try to stitch away what was happening. Just get back together I guess I used to say.

KM: Do you have any quilts from that time?

PS: I do, I have the first one I ever made.

KM: What does it look like?

PS: It looks like--you don't have tinkers in America, but tinkers come to the islands in the summer and they're gypsy people. It's a gypsy man. Only I was seven when I made it so it's a child's view.

KM: How big is it?

PS: It's about six inches square. I could send you a scan.

KM: I would love to see it. I would love to see it.

PS: I got a whipping for it because I made his kilt out of my grandmother's kilt, cut a piece out of that [KM laughs.] and he had gold rings because the man had gold rings and I cut those off the curtains. She was not very pleased. When she died they sent me a small shoebox of her belongings and that was in it. That and her teaspoons. I have them all, the spoons and the quilt. I remember when I had finished it she came in from milking the cow and I said, 'I have made me a real quilt.' And brought it out. Oh my, [laughs.] I thought she'd kill me. She was very angry but she obviously sensed something because she kept it and she died old, even older than me. [both laugh.]

KM: Why is quiltmaking important to you?

PS: I think it's important because women through the ages have had little or no accolades heaped on them for their artistic insight, so we have made our art our children, enriching our children, beautifying our homes, growing our food, cooking our food, stitching our garments and women are walking art to me. Their dreams, their voices, their eyes, their hands. And this was one area we could claim, this was our area and so the early ones are of women's things, lover's knots, graveyards, gardens, stacked windows [laughs.], and I just see it as something that in the world I lived in when my character was forming I could own and I could pull that needle the same way women had pulled bone needles from the first time women made art. It linked me. It gave me an anchor. It gave me a thread to clutch. Literally it gave me a thread.

KM: How do you want to be remembered?

PS: No, not personally, no. No, that's a funny thing that you said that because the last sweat lodge I was in with three of my daughters. One of the things, concerns that people were talking about was fame because my son was going through a bad reaction to his fame. One of the daughters turned across the sweat lodge towards me, I was facing the north in what we call the north of the circle and she said, 'He must learn to be like momma and want to be forgotten." That's how I feel. I want to leave no trace whatsoever.

KM: Not even with your quilts?

PS: Nope.

KM: Interesting.

PS: The nice thing about quilts is they decay. It's not like rock or metal, it will fall back into dust.

KM: And probably make someone sneeze right? [laughs.]

PS: [laughs.] Yes, that's a good memory, a sneeze memory.

KM: Tell me about the movies you've been involved in?

PS: Oh yes, actually videos, yes.

KM: Video.

PS: One was a young Indiana woman called Caroline Nellis and she had come to I think gallery talk. Whenever I have shows they usually ask me to give a gallery talk and so I do the real easy way, I just walk from quilt to quilt and tell the stories that arise out of them and she heard it and said that she would like to film it. She had never made a film before and she came with a man who had done sound on some films before. They spent I think four days here. She just kind of kept me pinned down on the chair and asked questions. It was nerve wracking at first and then you kind of forget that she is there because I often talk to myself when I'm working anyway so it just became like that after a while.

KM: What was the response to the video?

PS: You know, she won a couple of things with it in film, I'm not sure what they call them, competitions maybe [KM agrees.], that year she won some awards with that and then she got some notoriety from it too and was able to make other stuff. The second one that was done was done by the women's study group at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, because I've been there a few years in a row to do a show of quilts and made friends with a young Native American woman there who was the gallery director called Kay Hawley and she and Lynn and Lynn's daughter who funny enough went on to work on a show called Judge Judy. [both laugh.] Made a lot of money in producing that or assistant producer for that but at first she got her wings on that. I even forget what they called it. I've got a copy of it somewhere. The first one was called Woman of the Cloth and I think they just called it Penny Sisto, Fabric Arts and they won some awards too with that. In fact we showed it in Madison Square Garden years ago, because I went there, they paid me an airfare and a hotel room to go there and I went to New York City and it was pouring down rain and I was standing outside of Madison Square Gardens because it was a place I had heard of and there was no garden, it was just this ugly building, but they had a big notice for it outside all done in fluorescent lamps that kept switching and flickering and then up on the screen came "Penny Sisto, Fabric Artist now showing" and they named the place inside. I was so excited for some reason and so I said, 'Hey, hey.' There was a guy passing by, 'Look that's me right there.' But it was a homeless man so I don't think he even believed me. [KM laughs.] He just wandered on and I was left in the rain. [laughs.] That's funny.

KM: Do you think of yourself more as an artist or a quiltmaker or do you even make the distinction?

PS: My husband makes the distinction. He gets pissed off whenever I say I'm a quilter. I'm an old lady who lives in the woods and makes quilts. He says it should be artist and that they're not quilts. A quilt by my definition is a front, a back, and some batting in the middle. I kind of stretch that definition because one time I wanted to make a quilt about Peeping Toms and the way in which men are enchanted by and repelled by women's body, so I made the back of it gauze and the front of it gauze which I had starched by painting layers and layers of glue on it and out of that I constructed boxes so that it became lots of little boxes and on to them I sewed tiny little mirrors so that when you looked at it, if you got too close you only saw your own Peeping Tom eye looking back at you, but if you stood back from it you could see all the way through the quilt and for the batting I used women's pubic hair and I went to the local quilt group that would let me in [laughs.] and I took a lot of little envelopes with me and a big pair of scissors and they all said, 'Hey Penny, what are you working on?' And I said, 'Girls, do I have a quilt for you. I need some volunteers.' [laughs.]

KM: How many did you get?

PS: I only got four. [KM laughs.] All of my daughters got scalped and I got scalped and my husband got scalped so I guess there is some man hair in there too. Yeah, it was very meager. In my mind, the boxes were going to be stuffed but they were actually strands rather than stuffing of pubic hair. I don't know how I got away onto that sidetrack. See a quilt. Is it art or is just a quilt? It's up to us, isn't it? [KM agrees.]

KM: Do you still belong to the quilt group?

PS: Nope. No. I'm just not so sociable. I'm just not a good belonger. I never developed that habit. I think that's a habit you have to have the security to own when you're very young and developing. No. Even in the middle of our family gathering here over Christmas, there were 38 of us plus some friends and even there where it should be the most belonging, I think I do not belong. It's not a sad thing. I'm not sitting here sucking my thumb, it's not a sad thing, I just never developed that habit.

KM: What advice would you offer someone starting up?

PS: Starting up quilting? [KM agrees.] Oh my, I would say learn all the rules of sewing and quilting and then throw them all away because you need enough confidence to take steps and to be comfortable with your needles and thread. So learn everything that will give you that safety net, the delusion of knowing what you're doing and then throw all those rules away. I don't listen to people when they classify you as this, that, or the other. After the end of the Vietnam War, I made all together approximately 41 quilts about Vietnam because it impacted my generation so. All through the part of that war that I was familiar with I peace marched and got arrested a couple of times for it, but that was the side I came down on. After the war had ended and the real damage to America began, the alienation, the post-dramatic stress, the injuries to the inside of the people on both sides of the question, I decided that I had to pick up the responsibility for any verbal violence I had directed in my thoughts and in my chance towards these wounded warriors who had come back, so I began to going to Vietnam vet centers and as each quilt was finished I would take it to the centers to share it with the vets and ultimately I gave them all away to Vietnam vets. On about quilt 15, which was about 10 foot by 12 foot and on it it shows what at first glance looks like a flock of birds but turns out to be helicopters and what looks like a flower garden in the foreground turns out when you walk closer to the quilt to be a soldier eviscerated. His guts made of bright red satin spilling over. The library in Barstown, Kentucky, had said, 'We're having a local quilt show. Anyone with a newly finished quilt please bring it by and we'll have us a little show and hang them all in the library.' So in I marched [laughs.] taking them at their word with my scanky Vietnam quilt and they were horrified and one lady cried. They escorted me and my scanky quilt out. I was told it wasn't a quilt, it was pornography.

KM: Oh my.

PS: I wanted just to go home and kind of hide but I decided that I owed the people on both sides of that war more than that, so I spread it out over the library stone steps and I just sat there. If you wanted to go into the library that day you had to walk over my quilt to do it. Eventually the local paper took a picture of it and then some Vietnam vets came and you know they stood on the guard while that quilt was there in their raggedy old uniforms.

KM: Wow.

PS: It was extraordinarily moving to me.

KM: It brought tears to my eyes.

PS: Yeah. When my little revolt was done I gave their local center the quilt.

KM: Have you been back to see them at all?

PS: Yes, yeah, I'm good friends with a lot of them.

KM: What did the little library group, what did they think of your little protest?

PS: After a while it was, it was kind of like the transaction that happened in my own kids. After a while that little town before we moved kind of got a little bit proud of me and my husband who's a jazz musician. So instead of being the weirdo dairy farmers with all the kids who are, you know, a blemish, we became [laughs.] sort of--they liked us a little better. Now they get us back there.

KM: Very nice.

PS: Yeah. I think they got used to us. Well, with art its lot, sometimes the world catches up, sometimes it doesn't.

KM: What do you think makes a quilt artistically powerful?

PS: I think it's the woman or sometimes the man who makes it have enough spiritual energy spilling through her fingers to convey to the onlooker what she or he is seeing when they make it. It can be a single square that takes your breath from you and takes you to that same place you were there.

KM: Whose works are you drawn to and why?

PS: In art or in quilting?

KM: You can do both.

PS: I think [Vincent.] Van Gogh because I like people with flaws, they give you room to get inside them. People whose work is perfect is intriguing but there is no room for you inside it. There is no opening for you, for your input. I think he would be the person in art I'm most drawn to. There are quilters I love because I love them. I try not to--I know this is probably nothing that you want said but I try never to look at other people's work in my own field. I mean sometimes I do, but sometimes people ask me to judge something or the other, other women's pictures and quilters who I love will come over and we will laugh together and work together. Or I used to give workshops, but most the things I look at in everyday life are living things. Trees. I do a lot with animals and birds and they like me and come really close. I walk a lot.

KM: Tell me about your workshops.

PS: I have not--well, I was going to say I haven't given any for years because I'm pretty bad I would imagine as a teacher. They used to pay me a lot of money to do them, for us a lot of money, because we were pretty poor. They would take me to a place in Pacific Grove and I would do a workshop. I think three or four years in a row there. I would go there and have ladies pick from a pile of what I call "magic items" that I would brought an old rosary, petals, skeletons of creatures who have left us, leaves, bird feathers, owl feet, I would just throw them on the table and ask them to pick the one that spoke closest to them and then they would pick that up and tell you the story about it and then I would say; they would think they are going to make their first piece of art about that and I would say, 'Turn to the woman on your right and give it to her as a gift.' Then they would have to make the art about what the woman on the left had given them. Then I would take them step by step how to portray perhaps the face of an icon that came into their mind, a medicine spirit being. The kind of women I would get in my class would be, number one people drawn to pictures of my work that they'd seen and number two people who the workshop they wanted was overcrowded [KM laughs.] so mine had the fewest people in it so I got the overflow. Sometimes it would be someone who would come on a dare to themselves. There were things in my class I never want to face and I thought your workshop would force me to get inside. It would be a motley crew.

KM: That's a big responsibility for you.

PS: Yes. It likes the same as being in a teepee healing circle or in a sweat lodge. Same thing, it's all the same. We're all survivors, right?

KM: I do believe that. Is there anything that you would like to share that we haven't touched upon?

PS: No. Only, yes, I mean. Why did I say no at the start of the sentence? Yes, it's so rewarding to me to know that where I picked up my needle from the bone needles of those long gone. Young women like one of my granddaughters Annie, who's now four, has picked up a needle and spills her own blood with it and said, 'Granny, I want to sew with a needle even though it hurts.' Something happened during the course of my lifetime where women have again begun to own their own stories and own their own tools and whereas when I was very young art seemed to be for men. I think the fastest, most liveliest, most passionate artist that I know today are sewing women.

KM: I want to thank you for taking time out of your day to share with me.

PS: Oh, you also.

KM: You were wonderful.

PS: Yeah, and may you seen the moon tonight, I know I'll be looking.

KM: I hope I see the blue moon tonight too. I want to thank you because you're our last interview for 2009.

PS: Oh my goodness me, going out with a fizzle.

KM: No, going out with a bang. What do you mean a fizzle? We're going out with a bang. You were very wonderful.

PS: Thank you.

KM: We are going to conclude our Quilters' S.O.S. - Save Our Stories interview at 1:49.