Madonna Quilt is constructed from the artist’s used underwear. The quilt is an object traditionally of care, inheritance, and need. Each garment fragment has been held close to the body. Each has absorbed time, activity, and waste. What is socially private is reassembled into an object of value in both utility and artifact.

The work considers the figure of the Virgin Mary not as a literal mother, but as the symbol of the womb: the site from which first life and first love are believed to emerge. The womb and its functions are forever being aligned with kink, virtuousness, and divine safety.

The first site of worship is also the first site we are taught to reject.

The Madonna Quilt, sits at the threshold between intimacy and waste, devotion and destruction. It resembles an object of care, yet its surface disrupts cultural expectations of devotion. What is offered is not purity, but proximity. Not to an idea, but to its real body.

The work sits within a wider set of conversations around value and body. It touches on economic exchanges built around worn garments, biological frameworks of care and self-interest, and craft as a method of devotion, necessity and domestic labour. The piece considers how systems of cleanliness, privacy, and shame regulate proximity to the body. And to the feelings attached to it.

Madonna Quilt does not resolve these tensions. It stitches them together. It makes them. And wraps us close, inside of them.