"Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me" is a line from the poem, "The New Colossus," by American Jew Emma Lazarus, which is inscribed on the base of the Statue of Liberty, which she names as "Mother of Exiles." Shortly after I bought a set of two Japanese-style teacups, I dropped and broke one. Instead of giving up, I mended the cup and applied composition gold leaf to the cracks, both highlighting the breaks, acknowledging the event, and making the cup even more beautiful. "Kintsugi" is the Japanese technique that it references.
I've printed the text from my grandfather's wood type and jumbled it, reassembling it as the quarter log cabin pattern on the left. The cup in the quilt is that cup, interpreted as a metaphor: as hope in the future for immigrants, like many of our ancestors, once again.
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