About

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I combine fabric art and story together to highlight the power of vulnerability in healing. My quilts illustrate places on the inner life journey for looking deeply when encountering overwhelming obstacles. I chose the photobook format for their display because sequencing of art and story can powerfully and uniquely portray an underlying message that looking deeply into difficult moments often yields gifts of understanding.

This unusual endeavor integrates an authenticity afforded through ideas from one who knows suffering combined with my own unusual, artistic style that evolved from years as a psychotherapist. I focus on sentinel life moments through use of symbolic representation and scenes that evoke inquiry. Most of the ideas emerged from conversations with my daughter who when young became debilitated by a progressive illness. What started as an effort to help her with grief evolved into this larger storytelling venture calling the viewer to consider what matters most.

Art quilting offers an extraordinary array of possible materials, particularly well suited for exploring personal and interpersonal issues. Contrast, texture, embellishment, and fiber can be put together in ways that reach deep into the beholder’s inner life. We hope this book will be an inspiration to those coping with overwhelming challenges. With additional funding we envision the art along with the narrative in hallways of hospitals, rehabilitation facilities, and retreat centers, offering opportunity for healing reflection. I’m creating a second photobook with quilts and narrative focused on loved ones and caregivers engaging with souls trapped within overwheming circumstances.

Artist Statement

Biography of the Artist and Author

At age 74 I look back to when in sixth grade I chose to do a science fair project on “the Mind.” Raised in Minneapolis, I thought a great deal about what I describe as “inner life,” growing up in a family with many communication and medical challenges. I attended Stanford University and School of Medicine. Subsequently, I pursued a career as a child and adolescent psychiatrist focused particularly in two areas: caring for children with serious medical illness and enhancing communication skills of health care professionals. My orientation to the human psyche and interpersonal relationships awakened a deep calling to find ways to represent, in both art and writing, the challenge of finding personal meaning when facing major life predicaments.

This quest grew as three of my four children developed debilitating medical problems. All through those years, I always had a sewing project, sometimes of a practical nature but very often in the form of an art quilt stirring existential inquiry. While my Places We Find Ourselves book leans heavily on what I learned from my youngest child’s experience, I found inspiration essentially from the many kinds of relationships in my life.

My concern for people in great distress combined with my focus on improving communications in healthcare to form a foundation for developing visual and language representations of major inner life challenges. My experience directing the child psychiatry consultation liaison service when I was faculty at University of Wisconsin Madison Department of Psychiatry brought me to see heartbreak at the dawn of life. As a clinician educator, I directed a Clinical Medicine and Practice course and led third year full day workshops at the UW School of Medicine and Public Health where I thought deeply about how to relay communications concepts to medical students. Despite a very packed career and home life, I took time for week-long quilt art workshops over a number of years at The Clearing in Door County, a folk art school. The quilts I made went up at home but went largely unseen by those outside family and friends for all these years. On two occasions, however, earlier versions of some of my quilts were exhibited.

My quilt entitled, “Transforming Grief to Nurture What Remains,” was shown in the National Sacred Threads Exhibit in Virginia in 2017. In 2023, a solo exhibit of 36 pieces was held at UW Hospital and Clinics Madison, entitled Facing Adversity: One Family’s Experience With Chronic Illness, some pieces of which are included in the Places photobook.

This photo of the artist and author, Meg, was taken at the 2023 exhibit.

Lissie

Lissie, now 35, has maintained a zest for life adjusting her interests as her challenges changed. Her primary illness is Ehlers-Danlos Type 3 with dysautonomia. Although she showed symptoms earlier, she became quite affected by her illness at age thirteen. It took several specialists to learn the diagnoses, and she has had so many complications, one of her doctors called it a “perfect storm”.

Lissie inspired the first photobook which I allude to here as Places. In her teens, she did a great deal of writing, even completed a poetry book and half of a novel before her disabilities got in the way. She also became quite an artist in her own right, and here you can find a sampling of her art and writing created in her teens before her hands wouldn’t permit this any longer. The photobook alludes to some of the many innovative ways through stages of her illness by which she coped. One of the most interesting involved her learning about healing stones and crystals as well as Native American ideas concerning “healing animals” and totems. She built up a collection of what she deemed spiritual artifacts which she has kept in a special glass cabinet. Over time she included masks and fantastical beasties. Those things became a kind of anchor for her, and more recently she has pursued Japanese anime and figurines. As the pain became a greater issue, distraction has been her most useful tool for coping.

A self-portrait Lissie did in her teens.

Lissie has never lost sight of a goal she developed in her teens but couldn’t pursue because of limitations from the illness. She wanted to become influential in pre-K through 12 public education with focus on peace- with age appropriate subject matter related to everything from intrapersonal to global issues. When the path to higher education became blocked, and stuck with home care, she worked to create a team of university students pursuing health care careers with her physician parents overseeing their training in complex procedures. She shaped the way the team would have meetings, ongoing education on complex medical issues, as well as discussions on core values in patient care, which would serve as an adjunct to their formal education. Now with over sixty such staff in the last 15 years, the function of the care team has become exemplary, to which much credit goes to Lissie’s input.

In the journal entry to the right, about the disorienting experience of migraines, she uses highly descriptive imagery to do what the psychiatrist Dan Siegel describes as "name it to tame it."

Some of Lissie’s art and writing that was part of the UW Hospital and Clinics exhibit May 2023 are included here. These writings and art pieces done by Lissie herself reflect her drive to help others to consider the nature of suffering, invisible illness, and its connection to one’s spirituality-making sense of life even in the worst of times. Some of Lissie’s earlier caregivers, now physicians and physician assistants have come back to visit her, commenting on how working with her had been the single most inspiring experience in their training, because of her zeal to make the best of her challenges.

"My migraines are black cars so shiny that they look wet at night, so wet that I can see it raining through the buzz of static in my vision. They find me at a fancy restaurant. In crowds, in silence, in an airplane, in a bathroom, the black cars come find me. When no one is looking, when everyone is blinking, the sneaks park and pop out of their shiny black cars. They nab me and throw me into one of their shiny black trunks. The trunks are trunks of agony, full of fireworks and black cats and reveries and doorbells and bad breath and rainbows. Full of pillows that breathe and pulse loudly against my ear because they have disorders of the chest and erratic circulation. The trunks are full of agony but also full of patience -- clocks don't work there....."

Lissie painting ensos visiting a monastery in 2009

Lissie's self portraits in her teens

Lissie and her service dog, Kokoro, at the dog park in her late teens

At age 16, just as Lissie was starting a summer exchange program in Japan, she learned that a friend had committed suicide. When the news came by e-mail, she'd just arrived in an area of Japan where little English was spoken. When she tried to talk about what happened with this friend, she encountered unexpected responses, no doubt related to cultural differences. She wrote about her friend's suicide and how this traumatic loss evolved into a spiritual awakening for her.

"When he killed himself, he became lost to me. It was like he dove into that depthless canyon of death and created such a displacement of emptiness, that when it all splashed out, we were no longer co-existing in the same dimension. He was downright unreachable, but closer than ever possible, since now the only him I had was in me, at a cross-section where the dimensions fold through each other. But the displacement caused floods, typhoons, dark nights of questions; and the suicide murdered all possible external answers. And so began the assemblage of some sort of spirituality for me, the building of a home for questions, for being with questions like pain and permanence, and paradox, and death, and transience, and odd things, broken things, breaking things, lost things, loved things, ugly hard-to-look-at-things, breathtaking things...life things."

Photographer

The photographer of the quilts, Bruce Fritz actually an award-winning photo-journalist, took on the formidable task of capturing the dimensionality of these art quilts. In 1972, he attended a ten day Ansel Adams workshop in Yosemite, California, which intensified his reverence for the awesome beauty and the power of nature. He sees photography as a way to connect people and be a force for change. In 1976, he was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in News Photography. He specializes in on-location imaging of people, their lives, products, the environment, advertising, architecture, events, fine art portraiture and stock. “I share my vision and appreciation of the beauty and wonder of our world, and its inhabitants, with my photography. I strive to show how precious all life is. I hope my images move people to cherish our resources, and each other, and to see how critical it is to respect and preserve our environment so that we, and all life, may continue to thrive in the future.”

fritz-photography.com fritzmsnwi@gmail.com

Other Contributors

Many people contributed to the labor of love that developed into the Places photobook and the next one now in development, called Canyonlands of the Soul: Companioning the Embattled Soul. Among these contributors are Lissie’s dad, Timothy, my spouse of 54 years and a physician educator in geriatrics, as well as Lissie’s sister, Emily. They both provided much inspiration about thriving amid overwhelming challenges and also helped with editing. Lissie’s eldest brother has through the years brought a pragmatic perspective on many matters, which has turned out to be a surprisingly great gift. Lissie’s other brother, who had many medical challenges of his own, elicited from me ways of loving past big barriers in communication, thereby opening special doors for understanding. Mackenzie Mnuk has provided critical help with formatting the books and website.