In this new showcase I’m featuring four Modern Quilters that you will love!
Holly Cole
I am a full-time textile studio artist in Triangle, Virginia. After a long career as a costume designer or artisan for Broadway, regional, and educational theaters in 2016 I retired to a new life of working as an art quilter and surface designer. Additional fiber studies include surface design training with Kerr Grabowski. Elin Noble, Claire Benn,
Wendy Huhn, Susan Purney-Mark, Lynda Heines, Lotte Helleberg, and Ana Lisa Hedstrom; and art quilt training with Paula Kovarik, Jeanette DeNicolis Meyer, Julie Booth, and Joe Cunningham. Memberships include the Studio Art Quilt Association, Potomac Fiber Arts Guild, and the Triangle Dye Collective.
My theater design background instilled in me a love of drawing, creating characters, and telling stories. I like for my quilts to reflect both my love of animals and my politics. I started quilting in 2015 as a natural extension of the sewing, dyeing, and fabric printing I had done in theater. As a quilter I first explored a large range of surface design techniques and thread drawing using free motion quilting to draw imagery. Over the last 3 years my work has focused on drawing and painting whole-cloth quilts and creating series devoted to endangered species and the sentient side of animals.
To me nature and particularly animals are perpetually inspiring and I like to explore the point of view and emotional subtext that imagery can support. My color palette is driven predominantly by creation of mood and the colors of the animals I am painting. My goal is not for highly detailed realism because my priority is focused on emotional connection to the viewer. I love to work with splashes and splatters of color because of the energy they bring to the imagery. When I add quilting I strive for the stitching to build on the emotion of the imagery.
Annalisa Bollini
Hi, I’m an illustrator with a specialization in Art therapy and Didactics.
When I was a little girl my mother always knitted and crocheted. We daughters have this left. Every year a different wool sweater was invented, often very colorful but traditional models, other times more calm in terms of color but definitely more extravagant in terms of shape. I liked watching her work, her hands moved lightly and quickly and seemed to dance to the rhythm of a music that only she could hear. And I loved witnessing that magic that turned balls of wool into clothing to wear. One day she taught my sister and me the half stitch. From that day on, for many days, our favorite pastime became embroidering smurfs.
We came to create a veritable army of embroidered Smurfs, which stared at us for years, as my proud mother framed and hung all the small canvases on the walls. After that feat, I left needle and thread aside for a long time. When I started doing illustration I tried a lot of techniques to find my way. It came naturally to me to choose to use threads instead of a piece of paper because I believe that the memory of my mother’s hands, of the peace that shone through and of the magic that had so fascinated me as a child, suddenly made me feel at home after so much research. A familiar and welcoming house where, however, I had never entered before. In fact, embroidery was not a technique that I knew well, on the contrary, I had to learn most of the stitches and tricks by myself, but the feeling I felt pushed me to continue on that path. It was like one of those encounters between strangers who seem to always know each other.
To me the gesture and the quality of time, a slow and patience time, that embroidery requires makes the difference from any other technique. Embroidering means going inside the canvas not just remaining on surface. The needle enters the support, pierces it, modifies it and although the result is visible on the surface, the work done also involves depth. There is a desire to be linked to something, a deep sense of belonging, something that lasts, that stays together. Everything takes part of everything.
I think nature with its wonderful and mysterious shapes and inhabitants inspires me the most. But I’m also a collector of objects of any kind, from pieces of tiles to dry leaves, from old tools to masks. And sometimes they return in my works. The objects we own in fact say something about us, attract us and inspire us. In such a way we are all we hold. I used to create works very colorful, a tender palette of colors with some strong accents here and there.
Erin E. Castellan
My mother was a spinner, dyer, knitter and weaver. I grew up surrounded by textile processes, but my
true love has always been painting and drawing. I have a BFA in Textile Design from the Rhode Island
School of Design and an MFA in Painting from Indiana University.
In this digital age of slick screens and quick images, I craft physical images that promote slow viewing
experiences and intimate, tactile engagements.
I am curious about the point where the physicality of my chosen materials (paint, thread, beads and fabric) gives way to a larger intangible experience. I work intuitively, but also slowly. Each piece takes weeks, sometimes years to unfold. Stitch by stitch, bead by bead, my art is full of labor, care and attention. I patiently work my surfaces until the dream-like worlds seem to breathe on their own, pulsating with color and light.
I make work that roots me in my body and in sensation. The repetitive process of stitching and the images
that result from this slow process encourage a stillness within me. I hope the work encourages a sense of
stillness in others too.
Life is full of unexpected delights and inexplicable sorrows — visceral sensations that reason cannot touch, and words cannot explain. Being human, simply existing in this world, can be an extremely complicated thing to do. I believe art has the capacity to connect people across great divides. It reminds us of our shared humanity, makes us feel less alone, and eases the uncertainty of not having all of the answers in life.
I take inspiration equally from handmade objects (embroidery, quilts, knitting) and transient phenomena observed in nature (water, fire, shifting light, atmospheric mists). I am curious about big ideas related to being human in this world. In short, I strive to create pieces that evoke feelings of intimacy impermanence and the wonder of being here.
Daniela Witt
Hello, I am Dani, quiltmaker and textile artist. I love to sit at the sewing machine and mix unconventional quilts from a variety of fabrics and colors.
I originally trained in garment technology followed by a degree in garment technology. Then, after learning all the essentials of the garment industry and being ready to enter the fashion industry as a professional, I found that I enjoyed cutting up clothing and putting it into a new unexpected context much more. This was then my entry into the world of patchwork and the more I immersed myself in this cosmos the more fascinated I became. Since I know through my education how much energy and work goes into the production of clothing, a sustainable resource-conserving use of textiles is particularly important to me. That’s why I mainly use discarded textiles that can be found everywhere – be it in giveaway boxes, at flea markets or from acquaintances. Especially visible signs of use such as patches, scrapes and holes in textiles attract my attention, because they show the history of the textiles as well as their wearers from their previous lives.
In the beginning I experimented a lot with jeans and thus most quilts were very blue, but I also love to work with white linen or mix colorful fabrics wildly. Also, the first works were very strict geometric which is now loosening up more and more.
