The UK AIDS Memorial Quilt is coming home to Scotland on Saturday, September 12, just two weeks after the quilt’s founder, Ally Van Tillo, died on August 30. Marking the first time that it will be exhibited in its entirety in its home country, the quilt will be on view at the Glasgow contemporary art venue Tramway through October 4.
Four years after American activist Cleve Jones began the US AIDS Quilt in San Francisco in 1985, the late Scottish activist Van Tillo started a separate edition to memorialize those who died from HIV and AIDS in the UK. After nearly two decades in storage and its exhibition at Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall last year, the quilt will be displayed alongside archival material detailing its Scottish origins.
First displayed at London’s Hyde Park in 1994, the quilt has grown to 335 panels and now represents over 600 people lost to the deadly virus. The quilt is made primarily of three-by-six-foot panels, which correspond to the dimensions of a typical grave plot. Fashioned by loved ones, the panels depict hopeful messages, intimate embroideries, and patchwork mementos dedicated to the deceased. In one, rainbows spurt from a lighthouse toward intimate domestic vignettes on the perimeter. Freddie Mercury gestures out to the crowd mid-song in another panel, which is stitched into a patchwork tapestry populated with individual dedications.
“At the time, it was a resource for loss, bereavement and education,” Van Tillo shared in a statement just before his death. “It helped people make sense of their loss, humanizing the death of individuals that our government and media were painting as perverts and social pariahs.”
