For more than twenty years, I have been restoring a room stenciled by Moses Eaton in 1831. A well known itinerant stencil artist, Moses Eaton embellished homes in rural communities with hand cut stencils, when fashionable wallpaper was prohibitively expensive. His painted stencils survived beneath layers and layers of wallpaper. Some of his stenciled walls were destroyed and I re-constructed them, copying his process. 

Like wallpaper, stencils bring the natural world and the world beyond the home, into domestic space. Stencil artists often embedded references to contemporary life in their patterns. Our nascent country is represented by swags that encircle the room with bells at their center. In 2022, while I was working on the room, Roe v. Wade was overturned. Following the tradition of stencil artists recording their own moment, I inscribed this event into the room as a mourning swag. I also placed hand-crocheted hangers into holes left in the plaster by generations of framed pictures in a room that has long served as a sanctuary.