Almost a year ago to the day I was walking the labyrinthian streets of Parikia and found the remains of a Frankish castle. I knew it would be there, I had seen it on city maps days ago, but when my husband told me it wasn’t an intact castle but rather scant remains of the outer walls, I lost interest in seeking it out. And in later reading more about the site I’ve found my initial reaction wasn’t unique – indeed if you search for the castle online you will read reviews that include people expressing their disappointment, noting that the site isn’t worth visiting, and, perhaps my favorite, referring to the remains as “just a bunch of weird rocks.” As I stood before the largest remaining wall, however, I was in awe.

The castle was built in the 1200s on the Greek island of Paros out of cut marble from ancient temples across the island. My husband, a Latin and Ancient Greek teacher with a background in Classical Archaeology, told me that this was an example of “spolia” – a Latin word now used to refer to stones being taken from one building and repurposed into another. This was common practice in the ancient world and examples are vast and varied; it was sometimes the result of war, destroying a conquered city and using the pieces to build new structures, and other times it was done simply out of utility, skipping the laborious process of quarrying and cutting new stones. The remains of this castle in particular were further interesting to me as they have been incorporated into modern structures in the city, furthering the cycle of reuse.

I knew in an elusive moment of clarity as I looked at the castle walls that I needed to make a quilt inspired by this site. Although it took me time to determine my approach, I eventually settled on creating a quilt for a future scrap collection using the many neutral linen scraps I’ve accumulated over my four years working as a Production Quilter for Vacilando Studios. I have grown to love working with scraps after creating pieces for previous scrap collections – the restraints often lead to unexpected results and reducing textile waste is important to me – but making a scrap quilt also felt necessary to honor the spirit of spolia. I sketched a general design prior to beginning but ultimately let my scraps dictate the final dimensions and color of each shape, piecing the quilt row by row according to what I had available. A variation of the original scrap quilt is now the Quarry quilt, its name a nod to the ancient and renowned marble quarries on Paros but also to the fact that this design was the source from which the collection was in a sense mined.

After I finished the original quilt, I didn’t feel ready to stop exploring the castle and the concept of spolia. I started making wall quilt variations and new designs inspired by other sections of the castle’s remains, ultimately designing the Parikia quilt through this process. I consider both the Quarry and Parikia quilts to be translations, choosing this word intentionally because translations are not carbon copies. Translation is a work of art itself – a translator does not mechanically translate a text word by word but instead has a more holistic approach, taking into account the sound, imagery, syntax, and history of the original, and seeking to convey these elements in their translation in an effort to create a truer representation of the original. This is why a text can be translated differently by different people – it is subjective, not a straightforward act of reproduction. When designing the Quarry and Parikia quilts I was working from specific sources of inspiration, however the quilts are not mere copies but rather pieces made through countless decisions that sought to convey not only the image of the place but its essence – the lighting, scale, temperature, materials.

When designing the Quarry and Parikia quilts I distilled the walls into a set of basic geometric shapes and motifs, a sort of spolia language, and when considering how to expand the collection I began to think about the origins of geometry rooted in the Greek mathematician Euclid. I checked out a translation of Euclid’s Elements from the library, an act which felt funny as someone who has spent much of their life eschewing math, and was once again unexpectedly greeted by beauty. I not only admired the simple shapes of Euclid’s proposition diagrams, the lines revealing angles, ratios, and relationships, but also his understanding of math as yet another fundamental way of seeing and being in the world, of sensing pattern, beauty, symmetry, and interconnection, practices which indeed transcend the mathematical principles. This experience with Euclid led to the creation of the various Artifact designs within the collection, each design a proposition diagram that echoes the geometric shapes I had distilled from the walls.

After exploring the castle’s geometric shapes via Euclid, it felt only natural to begin building with them again just as the castle had been built using marble blocks isolated from their original setting. I designed the Edifice and Remnant quilts through this process, seeking to use the spolia language as well as architectural motifs from the castle site to create designs that bore little resemblance to the original source. These recreations were an opportunity to play and push myself, and it was during this time that I developed one overarching rule for the collection: nothing could be symmetrical. This runs counter to my persona, a perfectionist who loves organization, balance, and symmetry, but the concept of spolia has taught me the importance of overriding routine, of letting go of intention sometimes and resisting convention. This became clearest to me when my husband said that the castle had likely been built by soldiers with little care for aesthetics, and I found this fascinating given how beautiful I find the site. I don’t ultimately know who built the castle or how, but if what I imagine is true, perhaps it was precisely because the soldiers didn’t have a predetermined aesthetic outcome that this beauty was possible, random acts resulting in something beautiful beyond what could ever be preconceived.

Quarry

Parikia

Artifact

Remnant

Edifice

My last major consideration when creating the collection was how to thoughtfully introduce more color, as both the original source and quilt were entirely neutral. I choose colors that resonated between my own experience of Greece as well as those present in ancient texts as a way to forge a deeper level of interconnection between past and present – the rich hues of Homer’s wine-dark sea, grapes, and olives, the rosy hues associated with Aphrodite herself as well as pomegranates and bougainvillea, and the gold tones of honey, chickpeas, squash blossoms, and Sappho’s soon golden-sandaled Dawn. Shades of blue are also prominent in the collection, but curiously the color blue rarely appears in ancient texts despite being so dominant in the Greek landscape. I found myself descending down a rabbit hole while reading about the use of color in ancient texts, and this conversation is far deeper and more complex than I expected.

This was my first time creating a cohesive collection of quilts, but as I was working on the collection my steps felt familiar and I realized the process itself was a sort of spolia, using skills gained in one context and transferring them to another. I have been quilting for over ten years, but I learned to quilt while earning my MFA in Creative Writing and Poetry at Colorado State University. In graduate school the goal was not necessarily to become a poet in the formal sense but to find new ways of inhabiting and experiencing the world, to become more fully awake and attuned to the beauty and brokenness which surrounds us, and ultimately how to create from these patterns of thinking – a maker not defined by what is made but instead the posture which precedes the made thing, the listening, sensing, questioning, and observing, the habits and rhythms we create in an effort to more fully and deeply dwell in this world. When I was in the beginning stages of designing this collection, I happened to spend time with one of my graduate school professors for the first time since graduating in 2015, and after those conversations I wrote the following lines which have come to represent the collection for me:

song emerging

from silence the mourning

dove breaks through

spolia

spoil

spool

the remnant wrapping

the wound

Creating the Spolia Collection was an act of listening, sensing, questioning, and observing, an effort to fully inhabit a place and experience, braiding together different strands of artistry and time, stitching together not only the past and present but also my past and present, all in an effort to create beautiful, useful objects that will hopefully take on their own meaning in your home.