I Knew Before I Found Out

The Cancer Quilts (after Audre Lorde, The Cancer Journals), #1

I Knew Before I Found Out¹
Gabrielle Ione Hickmon
The Cancer Quilts (after Audre Lorde, The Cancer Journals)
#1
Cotton
32.25 x 21.5 in
2025

The Cancer Quilts² is a new and forthcoming body of work that visualizes my breast cancer journey. The series is of course an act of personal processing, but beyond any attempts at sense-making for myself, I am interested in creating a visual record³ of my experience with the disease in order to call attention to the prevalence of breast cancer diagnoses amongst Black women, the increasing rate of diagnosis amongst young Black women, the fact that Black women needlessly die from breast cancer at higher rates than any other demographic group, the long term impacts of cancer on a body, family, and community, as well as the pink-ribbon industrial complex and medical surveillance machine. I hope that by attending to and documenting my personal experience through this series, space will also be held or open up for attention to collectivities—collective experiences, glory, and grief.

I photographed this work in the chemo bay. Because I may be cancer-free, but I am not and may never be free from forms of treatment, from scans, from all of the scar tissue, from side effects. Suddenly a quilt can be a body, a quilt can be a timeline, a quilt can be a map, a quilt can be a performance,⁴ a quilt can be the moment I found out.

I am completely self-referenced right now because it is the only translation I can trust, and I hope that by tracing my weave back strand by bloody self-referenced strand, I will contribute to an altering of the whole pattern.⁵

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I started working on this quilt on the five year anniversary of my lumpectomy surgery. I will, Lord willing celebrate five years cancer free this October. The timing is apt to journey through making this work. Images of quilts are swimming in my head, heart, and hands. I look forward to sharing…

more soon,
Gabrielle

This quilt was made and series started while in residence at The Modern Ancient Brown Foundation. I am grateful to them for the time, space, and support.

1. The title of this piece comes from an essay I wrote in December 2023, “The Beginning of this After.”

the beginning of this after

2. After Audre Lorde, The Cancer Journals.
Lorde, Audre. The Cancer Journals. Penguin Modern Classics. Penguin Classics, 2020.

3. See textual records as noted in Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives, Second Edition. University of Minnesota Press, 2002. https://doi.org/10.5749/minnesota/9780816669851.001.0001. I am interested in expanding or extending the idea of textual records into the visual.

4. Thomson, Rosemarie Garland. “Dares to Stares: Disabled Women Performance Artists & the Dynamics of Staring.” In Bodies in Commotion: Disability and Performance. University of Michigan Press, 2005. https://www.fulcrum.org/concern/monographs/s4655h345.

5. This is a riff on an Audre Lorde quote from The Cancer Journals. Here is the original: "And yes I am completely self-referenced right now because it is the only translation I can trust, and I do believe not until every woman traces her weave back strand by bloody self-referenced strand, will we begin to alter the whole pattern." ​​​​​​​​