Be ˈKyu̇r-ē-əs! March
What are the facts of the matter regarding Edie Tsong's Matter of Fact?
As a matter of fact, Edie Tsong started sewing her artwork Matter of Fact in 1997 when she was a graduate student at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge!
Matter of Fact, 9' x 9' x 5.5', is made of felt and polyfil. It is permanently housed in the Anderson Museum of Contemporary Art in Roswell, NM
“I started sewing this grey thing in 1997, attracted to its brainy and visceral form. I gave myself the task of sewing it until it was a pile as tall as myself and called it Matter of Fact. Just a little project that would allow me to constantly digest what was going on in my life as a maker of objects and other things.
It was a good project to have for the nights of insomnia, loneliness, and restlessness. Though, every time I sewed, I could never quite get over the reason of why I was making it. If it was going to be meaningless, then it had to be bigger to acquire meaning.
The problem was that it took over my little shotgun house, and when I began travelling to residencies, there was the issue of storage. I was taken by surprise that in 2002 when I was living in Roswell and about to have massive jaw surgery. Donald Anderson, the generous benefactor of Roswell Artist-in-Residence Program, purchased the whole pile for the Anderson Museum of Contemporary Art. This paid for surgery in full and relieved me of the stress of putting it in storage. Donald built a circular platform on wheels, and it could be wheeled around the museum like a huge plate of spaghetti.
I continued to work on this piece through 2008, glad to have one stable activity when my life seemed so scattered. One time I brought some more sections to the museum in Roswell to add to the whole. Donald came out to take a look and he sat across from it. The sight of him sitting there looking at it was as if he were contemplating his own mind.”
— Edie Tsong
ARTIST SPILLS HER GUTS public art, one day only, 2541 Oleander St. Cancelled if raining. 05.29.2000
“I gave myself the task of sewing it until it was a pile as tall as myself and called it Matter of Fact,” said Tsong.
In 2009, Adrian Lopez, then a middle school student at Sidney Gutierrez Middle School in Roswell, wrote Edie as part of a school-museum educational project to find out more about her piece. Adrian then wrote and narrated the following:
"What do you think this piece is? Oversized moldy Spaghetti? Enormous Intestines? Albert Einstein's Brain Unraveled? You can make your own guess, but according to Tsong, the figures are supposed to represent both guts and brains; in a way, the way we digest information. Can you believe that she hand-sewed all of this piece? You have to be really determined to finish something as large as Matter of Fact. When she was creating this piece, she was always thinking, Why am I making this? I'm just wasting time. The more she created, the more meaning it had to her. She says that she would like to add onto this piece for the rest of her life! She used felt and polyester filling. She thought the gray felt was an obvious choice, and polyester filling was an obvious answer to support the structure itself. Tsong created Matter of Fact, not once, but twice. She first built it out of paper and then started creating the piece that we see today.”