Storytelling Quilts: From the Wisdom and Wit of Rozemaryn Van Der Horst

By Karen Valentine

A storytelling quilt crafted by kupuna Rozemaryn Van der Horst is more than a beautiful rendering of fabrics, hand embroidery, colors, patterns and shapes that tell a story, it is a glimpse into the brilliant mind and sometimes irreverent sense of humor possessed by this individualistic artist. In fact, if she were standing next to you as you view one of her quilts on display in an exhibit—maybe in Hawai‘i, in the Netherlands, or in Rome—you’d delight in hearing the real story of how the quilt came to be.

As an octogenarian, her memory of dates and chronology isn’t always right on the tip of her tongue, and it’s not important anyway. The tapestry of her unusual life is laid out in a panorama that needs no timeline. Each episode is colorful, intricate and unique, just like the squares in one of her quilts, which are never actually square—nor is she!

South Kona resident Rozemaryn, who was born and raised in the Netherlands (she won’t say exactly when; it was prior to World War II), counts among her former teachers and friends such well-known names as her kumu hula, Uncle George Na‘ope; the famous Dutch artist, M.C. Escher; Hawaiian language and cultural teacher, A‘ala Akana; and dear friends on Pitcairn Island, the descendents of Fletcher Christian of “Mutiny on the Bounty” fame. As well as being an accomplished painter, illustrator, and fabric artist, she is one of the founders of the Aloha Quilters of Kona, a member of Mensa, a pilot who flew a plane before she learned to drive, a hula dancer, world traveler, ‘ukulele player (amateur), home brewer, and the former manager of a local coffee farm, Loke Kai Farms, for 20 years. And, she can communicate in Morse Code.

After the war, she moved to the U.S. and worked for her father’s U.S. company, the Van Der Horst Corporation, which provided electroplating services for aviation. That’s when he sent her to Spartan College of Aeronautics so she could fly the company plane from coast to coast. She met and married Johan Thingbo, in Norway, in January of 1958.

Though she has no formal training in art, “I was always drawing and painting, since the time I was little,” says Rozemaryn. After becoming a newlywed and moving to Santa Rosa, California, she turned her talent to the pragmatic purpose of furnishing a home, and made her first quilt.

“My first quilt, see, it has blocks,” she points to the bottom half of the quilt. “That’s dull!”

The top half, however, is not. The torsos of two figures arise from the blocks. The woman is holding a rose between them. She was modeled after a picture in Playboy Magazine, says Rozemaryn. Her pink polyester skin has padding inside to form her figure. The man’s skin is brown, primarily because Rozemaryn ran out of pink. “But, oh, did it cause a stir,” says the artist. “I hung it in a local quilt exhibit, and the newspaper told everyone, ‘Come and see the interracial quilt!’”

The Hawaiian volcano goddess of fire and the Mauna Kea goddess of snow—Pele and Poli‘ahu—competed with each other in legend. In this quilt made of silk, undulating waves of black and white symbolize the battle of the goddesses and overlay the two dynamic figures, which are portrayed as hula dancers. The border has illustrations of traditional hula steps. This quilt sold for $10,000, she says.

Rozemaryn performed in the hālau of the late, renowned kumu hula, Uncle George Na‘ope, for eight years, during which time he took the troupe to Reno and Alaska to dance. “He was very strict,” she says. “I can tell, watching other dancers, whether they learned from him.”

Her hula training remains with her, as just recently she stood up to perform at the request of two friends in a restaurant. “A couple of ladies, my friends, were playing ‘ukulele in the coffee shop. They saw me come in and called out to me to dance ‘Little Grass Shack’ with them.”

“This was entered in a big quilt exhibit in Houston. Sometimes I create fabric pieces you can lift up and look underneath,” she said. “The shell placed just below the waist of the merman is loose. I watched several people in the exhibit walk up to it and look around before lifting it up. Underneath it I had embroidered the words ‘Disappointed?’” she chuckles.

The quilt she made for an astronomy exhibit at Keck Observatory headquarters on the theme of a black hole, has an irreverent, stuck-out tongue underneath a flap. “I didn’t really want to make ‘celestial’ quilts,” she exclaims. “I asked an astronomer at one of their monthly lectures, ‘Do you know what’s inside?’ He looked and was very insulted.”

The famed Dutch graphic artist, M.C. Escher is described by Wikipedia as being “known for his often mathematically inspired woodcuts, lithographs, and mezzotints. These feature impossible constructions, explorations of infinity, architecture, and tessellations.” Rozemaryn happened to attend a well-known school in Baarn, Netherlands, where Escher also lived at the time. During breaks from school, she says, “I met Escher, and he and the French teacher (also an artist) gave me drawing lessons while we walked in the Baarn forest. They would draw with a stick in the sand to show me how to draw perspective, etc. I was just a little girl in pigtails. I was fascinated and I had followed them and it amused him,” she says.

In 1998, she was invited to enter a quilt in an exhibit by the Escher Foundation in Rotterdam. Designs were to be inspired by the work of Escher, with repetitive patterns and tessellations—flat, symmetrical patterns of shapes, which can be optical illusions.

Rozemaryn’s quilt is entitled, “How Does a Cow Catch a Hare?” When she was a child, she says, her mother told her a tale based on a common Dutch phrase that is said when you don’t know how to do something. She said you can do anything when you do it in the right way. “How does a cow catch a hare? It hides behind a cabbage and makes cabbage noises,” she relates. Finding it a real challenge to represent Escher’s art, she was reminded of this saying, and when she saw cows laying down along Napo‘opo‘o Road, she decided to use them as her theme. As viewed from different angles, the quilt has shapes that resemble cows and hares.

On the backs of her quilts, she often stitches a related story or drawing. This one has a cow hiding behind a cabbage, looking at a hare and singing a French song about the hare running a zigzag path.

A U.S. Coast Guard veterans group, Friends of the Coast Guard, commissioned this quilt for its 200th anniversary. Rozemaryn consulted with Coast Guard officials here in Hawai‘i who helped her with the details. The border has various insignia and the interior portrays the first Coast Guard ship, the first lighthouse, a modern helicopter and sea rescue. After traveling around the U.S., the quilt is now hung in the Coast Guard Museum in New London, Connecticut. The Meadowlands Race Track also commissioned a commemorative quilt, after they saw the Coast Guard quilt.

With rows of hand stitching, in the style of a traditional Hawaiian quilt, the Breadfruit Tree Quilt is also an Advent calendar used to count the days leading up to Christmas, with flaps to be opened every day during Advent. Under each is a beautifully detailed Hawaiian image, from ancient times to modern era. Just above the second branch from the bottom on the right is a gold-leafed marijuana leaf.

“It was in 1991, and I was laying out a few leaves on my kitchen table, preparing to paint them, while talking with a friend on the phone,” Rozemaryn said. “Well, a storm blew up and lightning struck nearby, knocking out the phone. My friend thought I had had a heart attack and called the police to check on me. There was a knock on my door. With the leaves still spread out on the table, I looked out and saw who it was, and I almost did have a heart attack! I walked out to show them I was OK. Whew!” she laughs.

Pitcairn Island Connections

“My father went to sea when he was 15,” Rozemaryn says. She was always fascinated by the story of the HMS Bounty and its fate after mutineers took over from Captain William Bligh in 1789. They settled on Pitcairn Island, near Tahiti, and their descendents still inhabit the island.

“When I was little he used to tell me stories about his seafaring days, and included his visit to Pitcairn. There was a lady in Sausalito, California, who organized trips on sailboats all over the world in the 1980s. I heard that she intended to have a trip to Pitcairn from Tahiti, and I went and stayed on Pitcairn for several weeks. My hosts were Irma and Ben Christian. Later Ben and Irma came to Hawai‘i and stayed with me. The cookbook was my idea because I thought it would give them a chance to sell something to visiting tourists from cruise ships, besides the lauhala things she made.” Irma Christian is a commercial radio operator on the island. At the time, the ham radio was the only means of communication with the outside world. Because she also knew Morse Code, Rozemaryn developed a radio correspondence with Irma.

In 1986, they published the Pitcairn Island Cookbook, written by Irma Christian and illustrated by Rozemaryn, who transcribed all of the text in her own handwriting, which is also reproduced on the pages of the book. It is a fascinating combination of Pitcairn Island history, local agriculture, preparation methods and recipes used by the islanders. The cookbook cover is illustrated with a stunning batik made by Rozemaryn with a breadfruit motif and hand-dyed with dyes made from local plants. The breadfruit is meaningful to Pitcairn Island, as it was the reason for the voyage of the Bounty and Bligh’s mission to take breadfruit back with him.

The cookbook is available on the website, rozemaryn.com, and also on the website of Irma Christian and her son Dennis: pitcairn.pn/~dennisirmaproducts/products.html

Another ambitious project was a special, commemorative quilt.

“When Pitcairn Island approached their 200th anniversary of Fletcher Christian landing there, they asked me on the ham radio for [a quilting] idea in which the children could participate. I suggested a group quilt based on the drawings of the children. I think there were 14 in the school at the time. I received drawings and asked women from the fiber hui to select a drawing and pick some fabric. We did not copy the drawings but interpreted them. The quilt took one year to make. Five Pitcairn women participated and the others were from Hawai‘i. I put it together. The quilt traveled a lot: to Kentucky, Vermont, Switzerland, the Isle of Man, California, Texas, and Australia.”

Rozemaryn had also learned that the island needed a satellite dish and was inspired to help them, especially because it was the means for the children to get their school lessons. So the quilt was sold in a raffle and won by a man in England. It made enough to buy the satellite dish, and the winner chose to donate the quilt back to Pitcairn Island, where it hangs in a museum today.

Rozemaryn Ven Der Horst is quite good at organizing quilting projects. In recent years, she also organized the quilt contest for the annual Kona Coffee Festival. Today she remains active, with weekly outings to lunch at the Hawai‘i Community College Culinary School, playing ‘ukulele with a Saturday bluegrass kanikapila group, coffee with the local Mensa club and visiting with friends.

There are yet more stories and more one-of-a-kind quilts from this lively, one-of-a-kind artist at Rozemaryn.com

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Contact writer Karen Valentine: karenvalentine808 AT gmail DOT com