Born Analog, 2016

80" x 47"

Silk-screened and commercially available cotton fabrics. Fused and machine appliquéd, hand appliquéd, machine pieced; hand quilted. Winner of Juror’s Award, QN ’17. Photo credit: Jean Vong.

Quilt National Collection, International Quilt Museum. Lincoln, NE

Gertie is a dinosaur because she was drawn that way by animator Windsor McCay. I'm a dinosaur because, in this increasingly digital and digitized age, from 1976 through 2018 I was licensed by the City of New York to run 35mm motion picture film. Here I celebrate classic works of proto- and early cinema by Muybridge, the Lumière brothers, Georges Méliès, Edison, Buster Keaton, and Robert Flaherty, as well as my own history as a film projectionist.

The text in the outer border reads: "The cinema began with a passionate, physical relationship between celluloid and the artists and craftsmen and technicians who handled it, manipulated it, and came to know it the way a lover comes to know every inch of the body of the beloved. No matter where the cinema goes, we cannot afford to lose sight of its beginnings."

Martin Scorsese, edited extract from the book accompanying The Unilever Series: Tacita Dean, FILM at Tate Modern, London (2012).