Eliza Lutz: All the Lives Alive Inside Me

For printmaker and fiber artist Eliza Lutz, the work of caregiving is a legacy made visible through the material traces it leaves behind – a quilt, an apron, a handwritten note. Merging printmaking and fiber art, their upcoming show traces the shape and texture of carework as it has unfolded across the artist’s lifetime. Through embroidered prints on paper and quilted portraits assembled from loved ones’ clothes, these works chronicle the giving and receiving of care in all its many forms, from child rearing to elder care, from domestic arts to community organizing.

This body of work was conceived of and created during a period of immense transition in the artist’s life – after years of caretaking for three aging family matriarchs, all unexpectedly passed away within five months of each other. Over the following year, as Lutz and their partner navigated grief and sorted through the physical remnants of their lives, they found themselves at a crossroads – and, with more time and capacity at their disposal, they decided to enter a new chapter of caregiving by becoming parents themselves. “Now pregnant with our first child, I have become more deeply rooted in this lineage of carework than ever before, an embodiment of the lives, care, and labor, I carry within me,” Lutz says.