Betty Bivins Edwards: Food, Ritual, and the Southern Experience

Southern Quarterly, Winter 2004 by Joiner, Dorothy

JUST NORTHEAST OF MACON, Georgia, one can describe a triangle linking Eatonton at the top with Milledgeville on the lower right and Haddock on the left. The long sides of this triangle measure about 20 miles each, the base around 15. The line from Eatonton to Milledgeville joins the home town of Alice Walker to that of Flannery O'Connor, two of Georgia's most illustrious women writers. The dual lines from tiny Haddock to the other two rural towns are also significant. This little community of only about 500 is the birthplace of a third talented woman, Betty Bivins Edwards, who is now translating into the visual arts the Southern legacy of incongruity and human complexity forged by her fellow Georgians.

Who, then, is Betty Edwards, born so near the home towns of two legendary Georgia literary figures? Edwards grew up in a very "Southern" middle-class environment; she is roughly twenty years younger than Flannery O'Connor and of a social background different from that of Alice Walker. Her formative years wore fairly typical for women of her age and class. She graduated from Georgia College in 1967, majoring in mathematics and minoring in art. She taught math and art in the Georgia public schools until 1974. In 1981, she began to market her own original designs and to accept commissions for craft items. A pivotal experience sparking her development was a summer spent at Oxford, England, studying medieval art and literature. Since then her evolution as an artist has been rapid: from a craftswoman in the eighties working to supplement her family's income into an artist with compelling statements about the social roles of Southern men and women in marriage, in religion, and in politics.

At the often imprecise juncture of the particular and the universal, Edwards focuses her figurative quilts, Food, Ritual, and the Southern Experience, on the three ages of woman-maiden, matron, and hag-and on Shakespeare's seven ages of man, from the well-known passage that begins, "All the world's a stage." Gentle, even admiring in her satire of Southern life, Edwards presents each vignette against a neo-medieval, tilted background, using a syncopated scale by which men are as big as cars and a lady's toothy smile is wider than her arm. Basing her compositions on the cultural foci of Southern culture-food, a curiously ambivalent matri-patriarchy, and the Protestant religion-the artist finds ingenious equivalents to the real world: saltine crackers and ice cubes from plastic, fried chicken out of brown fustian, salt from tiny pearls. Edwards's men wear wind-breakers constructed with actual zippers, and her ladies lift fingers weighted with real crystal rings. The quilts embody the artist's memories of "growing up Southern" as well as her perceptions of the contemporary South.

Launched into matronly life, a new bride in The Reception (1992) grasps a spiky knife of metallic silver cloth to cut into a luscious, elaborately tiered wedding cake. Decorated with turtledoves, pink flowers, and miniature classical columns separating its alabaster layers, the cake epitomizes the event's stilted atmosphere. Her hair bright yellow, according to the Western tradition that exalts blond as ideal, the bride holds hand to chest in a gesture of adoration like that of a Greek kore. Arranged to create dramatic baroque diagonals against the genuine Battenberg lace tablecloth, food and serving dishes take on a life of their own: a metallic cloth chafing dish with snake-like supports holds the brown velvet imitating warm chocolate, wherein floats a prominent red gingham strawberry; a punch bowl of quilted silver cloth in the upper left is filled with pale green fabric meant to be 7 Up tinted by melting lime sherbet; the satin surfaces of the pink and green rectangles on the right mimic the smooth, sweet icing of the mandatory petit fours. Undercutting, but gently, the celebratory atmosphere is a plastic housefly on the tablecloth, near the cucumber sandwiches. And peeping out on either side from the prescribed gaiety, a flower girl and a ring bearer seem reluctant to join the party.

A round table serves as center for Ladies at Luncheon (1994). Here, scrawny but broadly smiling females stand in high heels, their ample teeth outlined by Edwards's signature ropes of lurid red cotton lipstick. The ladies hold goldrimmed porcelain plates, pimentos emerging from the olives as vivid as their elongated, red pepper fingernails. A little girl on the left, however, demonstrates with a frown her stubborn resistance to the socializing process, as she is made to offer her own plate of delicacies.

Barreling down an S-curve on the highway, the blue satin car of First Time Behind the Wheel (1991) conveys the adolescent male's daredevil yet timorous behavior. Tail Hipped up at an angle to the hood, oversized front wheel in black corduroy seeming to spin wildly, the car overshadows the individuality of the young man, whose face is almost hidden within the vehicle. His other preoccupations-fast food and fast women-loom up on the billboards lining the road: McDonald's, Kentucky Fried, Arby's, and a slinkily dressed woman holding a cigarette, the daring V on the back of her dress serving as the conventional sign of the female.