Oscar winner’s hobby is a stitch in time
Retired Canadian set decorator Jim Erickson is parting with his 300-strong quilt collection
Standing on the freshly wrapped set for Lincoln a couple of years back, Jim Erickson had an epiphany. “I just sort of said to myself, ‘I don’t think I can do better than this. Maybe this is it,’ ” Erickson, a Canadian set decorator with a couple of dozen big-budget Hollywood blockbusters to his credit, recalled earlier this week. And with that, Erickson, 64, retired.
He couldn’t have guessed he’d make one more Tinseltown turn, though, winning an Oscar last year for his set decoration on Lincoln (his expectation of winning was low enough that he watched his name being announced on TV, from his home on Saltspring Island, B.C.).
Whatever the case, it’s a nice memento of a career well spent. Erickson has another, though, that seems a little closer to the heart. On Saturday, the Bowmanville Antiques and Folk Art Show opens with an exhibition of 300-some historic quilts Erickson collected over his 35-plus years in the movie business.
The quilts were culled while on set for such movies as The Last of the Mohicans, Ali, The New World and There Will Be Blood. He started out of practicality but quickly moved on to a hobby and then a full-blown fascination.
“I specialized in period pictures,” Erickson explained. “I’d be out looking for things for a movie and I’d often find a quilt to hang in my office that would have the colour palette of the era. It would be a reminder of where I was going.” Then, when shooting Mississippi Burning in the south in 1988, Erickson found himself drawn to flea markets, where stacks of historical quilts would be piled high for sale. “I just started picking them up and, before you knew it, I had 30,” he said. Then, in Asheville, N.C., where he was shooting The Last of the Mohicans in1992, “I met a great dealer and it really just exploded.” Quilts, for him, became freighted with meaning. “It just started growing: suddenly every quilt interested me. Every style, every period,” he said. Well, not quite every. The collection spans the 18th century to the 1950s, where he draws a line. By then, he says, Mennonite and Amish communities had started quilting specifically for the tourist trade. “Prior to all that, they made them out of necessity or ceremony or love. There’s a soul in the quilt that I find so interesting.” The collection, like Erickson, crosses borders, tying together works from Canada and the U.S. About a third of it is Canadian. For Erickson, regardless of origin, each and every piece was a point of communion. “Every quilt I bought, I spent one night under it,” he says. “It was important for me to claim it, I think.”
Still, 300. “I know. It’s a lot,” he chuckles, mentioning that it’s become too much for him to care for. Which is why the collection is now officially for sale. Carol Telfer, a Stratford dealer working with Erickson to sell the collection, doesn’t want to see it sold off piecemeal.
“We’re not breaking it up, not at this point,” she said.
Showing it in Bowmanville, the premiere folk art event in Canada, Telfer hopes to lure a patron who will then donate it to a Canadian museum.
“It sews the social culture of two countries together,” she says. “It’s not just pretty quilts; there’s an intensity. It would be a shame if it were lost.”
Erickson, meanwhile, is holding on to a few: one by his great-grandmother, one his mother and aunt made with his grandmother, one by a great aunt that he’s particularly fond of. (“Back then, everyone did it. It was how you kept warm in the winter,” he said.)
Outside his window, magnolias and daffodils bloom. But doesn’t an Oscar winner get an itch, now and again, to get back in the game, or at least a call?
“It would have to be something extraordinary. I never think about it, to be honest,” he says, noting the expanse of blooms just outside his window.
“I didn’t want to be one of those old farts in the corner who should have retired long ago,” he says.
“Besides, retirement is just too busy.”