my collection: material possessions

My grandmother Audrey, who was born in 1922, had a great sense of humour – one of my favourite things to do was to make her laugh. Her father was a musician; she would accompany him with her accordion, and they’d play at bars around the Norwegian-American community in South Minneapolis. She married my grandfather when she was in her early 20s – prior to that, she was very proud of having been an executive secretary. She didn’t work out of the home after she’d had a couple of children – she was very focused on her family, her friends and her community. She loved dancing.

In the 1960s, she began collecting wool skirts and continued into the ’90s. She bought all of them secondhand from thrift stores close to her home in St Paul, and had over a thousand at some point, but gave hundreds back to secondhand stores. She didn’t talk about the collection, even to her closest friends, but we knew about it because we saw it. She kept the 632 skirts in boxes with newspaper in her basement, believing that the newspaper ink would repel moths, which seemed to have worked for her.Nothing stopped her from growing her collection, but she didn’t live in a context where she understood herself as an artist, or could claim a role as a collector. I distinctly remember her going to the rack with skirts in the thrift store, and touching them all. That was her way of assessing the fabric. She was also really drawn to the colour and pattern – she found the skirts so beautiful.

Beyond that, she was looking not just for skirts as skirts, but also as material that could be used towards other purposes. And so she collected skirts in all sizes; when she found a nice, heavy pleated skirt, she would think to herself, “Oh, well, that’s a lot of fabric.”For my mom’s first assignment in a weaving class at graduate school, she asked my grandmother if she could use fabric from the skirt collection. My grandma cut up some skirts and made them into strips, and my mom made them into a rag rug. That precedent has informed our approach on what to do with the collection.

Some of the skirts are entirely pristine and others aren’t. There’s one amazing spring-weight wool skirt in pastel colors with a splattering of mud on it, clearly caused when somebody drove by. There are so many stories, but we’ll never know them.

To read the rest of this story and learn more about Mae's woollen skirt collection, nab a copy of issue 131 from the frankie shop or visit one of our lovely stockists. For future issues, subscribe here.