Bedspread c. 1937

Margery Parish made this bedspread with watercolor and graphite on paper; it's all about the process. The way she layers colors and lines feels like watching her think. There’s a kind of obsessive, almost meditative quality in the way she repeats motifs. It's like she's building a world, one tiny mark at a time. The surface isn't smooth or blended; it's raw, immediate. You can see the graphite under the watercolour. The imperfect lines and colours create a handmade aesthetic, contrasting the mass-produced nature of a typical bedspread. The repeated script almost becomes a pattern. The text is not perfectly legible, and the meaning is lost in translation, transforming the words into shapes. It reminds me of the work of Ree Morton, the way she mixed the personal with the formal, creating these wonderfully strange and intimate spaces. This piece invites us to embrace ambiguity and find beauty in the imperfect.