Seldom Perceptible: A Traumatic Brain Injury Quilt

Seldom Perceptible: A Traumatic Brain Injury Quilt
Amy E. Elkins
46 ½” x 58 ½”  
Eco-dyed fabrics, cyanotype, cochineal and madder-dyed thread, fossilized snake vertebrae, embroidered cheesecloth, and silk batting.
2025

Seldom Perceptible: A Traumatic Brain Injury Quilt is an art quilt made to commemorate two decades since I experienced a sudden traumatic brain injury on August 17, 2005. I navigated the following months as a college student with a double concussion and a fractured skull—an experience that would come to shape my life in complex ways for the next twenty years. This post includes images and my full artist’s statement.

In his first book, Migraine, the neurologist and storyteller Oliver Sacks includes an appendix of various “remedies” proposed by various researchers from the late 17^th century to the turn of the 20^th century. In A Manual of Diseases of the Nervous System, William Gowers describes several treatments for migraines, but ultimately concludes that the value of such approaches is “seldom perceptible.” This quilt, taking its title from Gowers’s observation, explores the nuances of invisible disability and chronic pain.

The cyanotypes on the front of the quilt are made from my X-rays and CT scan films. These panels—and the brain scans in the quilt’s sashing, or margins—allowed me to collaborate directly with the project’s origin point. As an archives and material culture scholar, I’m endlessly fascinated by our personal archives and the ways in which artists respond to, remake, and reorient objects from the past. The cyanotypes also make the inside visible, bringing the internal body into an external, tactile form.

Seldom Perceptible is also an experiment in what I call “resilient quilting.” I intentionally break the rules of traditional quilting by mixing fabric types and only using eco-dyed scraps. Textile artist and cultural theorist Eve Sedgwick describes the ways craft materials push back against the maker, giving rise to new forms of agency and artistic reciprocity. Much of this quilt is improvised, an approach to artmaking that mirrors the unpredictable vicissitudes of living with an invisible chronic condition. These formal quilting practices engender ideas about recovery and resilience as I consider the role of mental and physical toughness as both helpful and detrimental. The quilt is literally held together by fossilized snake vertebrae—a way of commenting on the aesthetics of Southern feminist grit, the idea of “growing a backbone” or “having a spine” in the face of difficulty.

A composite poem is embroidered on the back of the quilt—lines taken from my journal entries from late August to early October 2005:

The cheesecloth quilt-back calls to mind medical gauze, and the silk batting it encases emerges between the embroidered stanzas (and around the quilt’s perimeter—the internal part of the quilt ends up being its binding, fully visible and undoing the quilt even as it holds it together).

Seldom Perceptible is a love letter to fellow migraineurs and TBI survivors; a meditation on the art of neurological diversity; a multimedia representation of my personal archive; a testament to chronic pain from migraine with aura to musculoskeletal misalignment; a visual theory of the resilience paradox; an embodied record of the natural world in my healing journey; and a largescale exploration of the seldom perceptible—making the invisible visible through craft.