In this new showcase I’m featuring four Modern Quilters that you will love!
Pachi Sarmiento
HOLA, Pachy Sarmiento-Bull here. I’m a Venezuelan graphic designer, visual & multimedia artist currently based in Atlanta after spending 13 years in NYC working as an animator/art director. In 2016 I started teaching myself quilting. I bought some fabrics and made a very simple design and that was enough for me… I got the bug! I started seeing everything as a quilt and began translating some of my friends’ work into quilts.
The first experiments were good but I needed it to learn the actual quilt techniques to get better results. So the INTERNET, quilt-alongs, practice and curiosity, and experimenting. Sometimes I get so excited about an idea that I’ve started working on in Illustrator that I just have to jump to my work table to cut some fabrics and start testing. My quilts are very graphic and simple at first look, but they contain lots of math and geometry behind them.
My color palette is very restricted, by choice.At the moment I’m working with blue, pink, yellow, red, black and white. I do go out of this palette for commissioned work or for gifts that I make for my friends’ babies. I have a huge stash of fabric, but when I get in love with a fabric I CAN’T USE IT! They are so precious, and no project is good enough for them… in other words I’m a fabric hoarder.
My plan with quilting was to learn something that I could do while momming, I was SO naive… I have tons of ideas that need to be translated into quilts but as a full time mom/house coordinator (HA!) I don’t have much time on my hands. My work is slow, even though all my quilts are machine-pieced they are all hand-quilted, no matter what. And this is my absolute favorite part of the process, so I don’t produce many quilts a year.
I get inspiration from street art, typography, graphic artists, nature and my home country folk and modern art.
Chandra Wu
I am studying my relationship with color after making quilts for over 20 years. I seem to gravitate toward compositions in blues or red and black. I’m beginning to explore using complementary colors to extend my palette. I employ a lot of repeating block designs, and lately I have been working more improvisationally or with irregular blocks.
I learned to sew and quilt from both my mother and my grandmothers — I feel more connected with them as domestic engineers when I sew. The natural beauty and the modern industrial life along the Washington and British Columbian coastlines influence my work in improvisational patchwork and rhythmic stitch patterns. Lately I have been intrigued by freight logistics and landscapes inspired by power lines, cargo freighters and trains. I like including weathered, found and reusable textiles, especially denim jeans. I enjoy the intersection of industrially produced materials and worn shapes with natural ones. As a lifelong educator, I love teaching students of all ages how to re-examine the natural world and express themselves using tactile responses to fabrics with textural stitches.
Beverly Smith
I am a retired veteran high school art teacher of 33 years. I received a Bachelor of Science degree in Psychology from Morgan State University, a Bachelor of Arts Education degree from the University of North Carolina in Charlotte, and a Master of Art Education degree from Winthrop University in Rock Hill South Carolina.
My combinations of media act as encoded sigils through which she seeks to process the past and create imagined narratives that have layers of meaning about time, personal and political conflict, and memory, all the while paying homage to those who came before me.
I am a mixed-media fiber artist. I choose to express myself through quilts because of their
personal connection to my ancestors and Southern roots. Through my subject matter, I explore a new narrative of equal rights and opportunities for all genders, and specifically giving a voice to women and girls. The female figures in my quilts engage viewers in a direct gaze – an evocation of solidarity – as if to say, “I see you, so I know you see me.” By featuring women and girls in my quilts, I aspire to promote, honor, and celebrate perspectives of women across geographic, racial, and ideological lines, all the while paying homage to those who came before me.
My quilts acknowledge the strength, preciseness, and ingenuity of traditional quilts. I also
expand upon these traditions by adding my own aesthetics. The strong correlations I make with African textiles and my grandmother’s quilts certainly impacted my own quilt styles. My grandmother taught me that the smallest piece of fabric can hold generations of truth. Therefore, it is characteristic of my works to contain nostalgic materials, and re-claimed garments.
My choice of fabrics come from vintage feed sacks constructed during the 1930’s and 1940’s from the Great Depression era, repurposed clothing, and upcycled vintage quilts. My quilt surface is layered with machine and hand stitching, paint, indigo dyes, transferred images, and found objects. My signature graphite drawings are rendered on unprimed canvas using various gradations of pencils. I typically use an applique process that is sewn directly to the quilt top.
This transforms my figures into ancestors that tell stories from another time.