In this new showcase I’m featuring four Modern Quilters that you will love!
Frances Palgrave
My name is Frances Palgrave, I was born in Cologne, currently I live and work in Hamburg. After
several years of working with photography, drawing, acrylic painting and paper collages, I switched to
textile art in 2015.
Originally a self-taught artist, I derive ongoing inspiration from frequently learning and experimenting with new techniques. After initially stitch drawing with black threads on a white background, I gradually began to create more colourful textile collages, which over time became more and more detailed as well as large scale. Textile collage offers me the opportunity to use materials with their own history for my ideas and put them in a new context.
Thematically, I like to deal with questions of identity, everyday life and nature. The process of creation is often very lengthy, it takes time to find the right colours and materials. In addition, I always sew my works from both sides. For this, there are all the more details to discover in the finished pictures, which tell their own stories as side strands and – at the same time – form an overall fiberart work.
Natalia Bahaine
I assume the artistic practice from practicing contemplation and silence. I use meditation as a tool to stimulate the solitary and patient observer that exists in me. I rely on nature as a source of inspiration with the objective to understand the impermanence which is innate to all things. To do so, I keep fragments of the present time as a way to maintain the memory alive and grasp the necessities that we have, as human beings, to be part of something and to build identities despite the constant unfolding of life. I rely on four disciplines for my artistic process: photography, embroidery, painting and literature. These help me to elaborate a proposal around the arrangement of images as well as to think about new realities, within constantly changing ones.
I was born in Barranquilla (in the caribbean coast of Colombia) in 1981. I lived in Bogotá for 20 years and recently moved to Geneva. I studied Social Communication with emphasis on Audiovisual Production and I made also double program with Literature. In 2008, I decided to study photography and I dedicate all of my time to art since then. In 2005 I trained as a yoga and meditation teacher. Throughout my life, I have tried to mix my two passions: art and spirituality.
Since I was little, I felt a very powerful inclination for letters and cinema. I was very lonely and for some strange reason, the letters sustained me. My mother ran an interior design studio, and throughout my childhood, early adolescence, and adulthood, I watched her knit, embroider, and sew. I never thought that this childhood territory would influence my future work so much.
For many years, the language known to me – photography and literature – were the basis of my artistic work. And so, as the rain falls daily from the Bogota sky, I began to feel a very strong need to use the threads that I saw in my childhood in my work; Of course, I started with the threads from my mother’s atelier. Today, my work is tied, knotted and joined, thanks to these threads that have allowed me to take my artistic search to other places. Each photo is linked by a thread. Every thought carries a thread. Each landscape is woven thanks to the thread.
Gaby Sartori
I am a mother of two beautiful young men and my little Julie. I hav been married for 21 years and have been doing patchwork for over 10 years!
I am from São Paulo, Brazil, the land of soccer, carnival and many other cool things.
I started patchwork when the boys were small and engineering work was no longer making sense in my life. I wanted more free time with them and to be able to follow their growth closely. For a long time it was just a hobby, but it opened me up to the creative universe.
When they were older and were well on their way to school, I decided to study Interior Design at the “Escola Panamericana de Artes e Design” here in São Paulo. It was a creative explosion in my life, I learned a lot and I even taught project classes at that same school.
Then came the pandemic, the school was closed and no prospect of new classes, what could I do? Sew masks!
I dusted off my machine and went full production of masks exclusively for
donations. Until they were no longer needed. And the urge to create and sew came back strongly. And here I am! A mix of mother, designer, quilter, teacher and engineer. Finally, through foundation paper piecing, I found a way to combine my passion for design and sewing, and I am really very happy. Foundation paper piecing has become my obsession.
Since I was a child I have liked fantasy and playfulness. I like gnomes, fairies and dragons. Ah! The dragons, from Falkor in Neverending Story, Saphira in Eragon, Draco in Dragonheart to the three not so nice ones in Game of
Thrones.
I have already given spoilers of my other great passion, films and series. I love suspense and romantic comedies, but I have no maturity at all when it comes to Harry Potter, Narnia, Lord of the Rings.
I am also in love with the Scandinavian style, not only the design, wonderful, but mainly the simple lifestyle, of having pleasure and valuing the little things, the moments with family and friends. For me, there is no greater pleasure than lying with the children on the grass to watch the stars, than the smell of wood burning or the dew on the
pines or the baking of orange cake.
And I think that’s where my inspiration comes from, from nature and animals, from the innocence of children, from the simple lifestyle, from things that bring happy memories in a simple way.