Strings Attached & Wired to Snap (3D) (detail)

Road rage, domestic violence, mass shooting—what makes a person snap?  “It’s the continuing series of small tragedies that send a man to the madhouse…” Charles Bukowski wrote in his brutal ballad The Shoelace, “not the death of his love but a shoelace that snaps.”  Charles Bukowski’s poem “The Shoelace” is hand-embroidered on seventy-seven feet of ribbon and stitched to each quilt.  The poetic wrapping evokes familiar feelings of comfort, tension, mystery, and healing.