Law of Salvage: Queer Stories of the South Coast

Throughout their residency, the artists have collaborated on textile, ceramic, written word, and printmaking to imagine and expand upon known queer history. Their pieces riff on traditional crafts–quilts and scrimshaw–and gendered divisions of labor to disrupt the binary and represent the unacknowledged queer laborers who built New Bedford.

 

Elaine (e/em/eir) designs and creates functional art that blurs the boundary between craft and fine arts, nature and artifice. Using sustainable and found materials, e practices a broad array of disciplines, from weaving, knitting, and quilting to botanical printing, photography, and collage. Motifs from the natural world–playful textures, and evocations of plant and animal forms–unite eir body of work. Driven by curiosity, tenderness, and hope for the future, Elaine uses diverse media to explore the relationships between humans and their ecosystem partners, including non-human animals, plants, and fungi.

 

Beatrice (they/she) is a writer and teacher, descended from Jewish immigrant garment workers and New Bedford whalers. Beatrice’s historical fiction and zines draw from archival sources, family folklore, and oral traditions to give voice to unacknowledged queer ancestors. By piecing together letters, images, and other fragments, Beatrice creates patchwork histories that show their seams and leave room for queer joy. Through storytelling, she hopes to bring silenced figures back into the fold of history–not as tragedies or flukes, but as the heroes of their own tales.