The Quilt as Archive
Cody Cook-Parrott
https://www.codycookparrott.com
Community Sewing Hours:
Monday July 7 - Friday July 11, 1-3 pm
Exhibition Opening:
July 12, 5-8 pm
Cedar North Classroom Gallery
2312 E Kasson Rd
Cedar, MI 49621
Free and open to all!
Cody Cook-Parrott is an interdisciplinary artist and writer living on the Leelanau Peninsula. Working primarily in textiles, writing, and movement, Cody explores improvisation, attention, and memory through handmade quilts, personal essays, and somatic practice. Their work often investigates the domestic as a site of both utility and poetics, treating everyday objects and rituals as living records of care, grief, devotion, and experiment. Cody holds a BFA in Dance and hosts workshops, retreats, and artist residencies that support creative experimentation across disciplines.
The Quilt As Archive is a collection of seven works of quilted material made for the wall, designed for the bed.
Each piece is built from fragments, mostly second hand fabrics from Northern Michigan thrift stores and Arts and Scraps in Detroit. Working with materials that hold stories from before they became blanket. This process resists the tidy logic of the pattern and instead honors the mess of lived time. These quilts function as open-ended documents: records of daily labor, grief, attention, and revision. They are ledgers of a life unfolding in fabric.
Rather than cataloging history through fixed meaning, The Quilt As Archive proposes the archive as something porous, present-tense, and deeply personal. What is kept, what is repurposed, what is made public—these choices shape the form. Each quilt carries traces of its making: exposed seams, unplanned shifts, moments of doubt sewn in alongside precision.
This is not a display of perfection or permanence. It is an offering of evidence—of artistic process, domestic record-keeping, and the freedom to not always know what comes next.
These quilt tops were made in Mississippi with the creative guidance of Mary Ann Pettway, China Pettway, and Anne Robertson and finished in Cody’s home studio in Cedar, MI.
