In this new showcase I’m featuring four Modern Quilters that you will love!
Laura Wennstrom
I am a multimedia artist, who makes small fiber based works, quilts, and large scale sculptural installations. Drawing from painting, collage, and quilt making traditions, I create heavily saturated color compositions. I am interested in gathering found materials and fabrics: the cast off, the forgotten, the incidental. Through an intuitive process of combining color and pattern, I find new ways to give these materials life.
I primarily use found or secondhand fabric and textiles in my work. This has ecological and economic advantages, but most importantly, I am drawn to the connection that discarded materials have with their previous owner. These objects carry stories and mystery, they have access to the banal secrets and intimate everydayness of strangers. Bed sheets that have enfolded Other bodies, clothing has kept them warm, objects that silently witness a life. Possessions and materials that have been tossed aside for unknown reasons. I risk that what someone else has left behind is worth adopting, and making into something new. Potential.
One avenue of exploration in my work is my everyday experience as a mother and caregiver to young children in an age of political and social unrest. How do I survive the day, protect my children from sickness and violence, and simultaneously hold space for those who do not carry the same privilege? I am a singular person and yet the world has infinite needs and overwhelming waste.
The things I make don’t cure pandemics or protect black boys from cops or mask a virus or give respite and relief and shelter and… But by focusing on the excess before me, I am able to stitch, assemble, collage together some beauty, and therefore make some hope out of waste. That maybe there is enough to go around. The slowness of stitching prevents my fingers from doom scrolling, reminds me to slow down. I create art because the process fills me with joy. It brings me peace in the midst of pain. I present my work in an attempt to share the hope I find.
ON QUILTING: I remember my grandmother teaching me to stitch at a very young age. My mom sewed clothes and curtains as I was growing up. I learned how to use a sewing machine in 7th grade Home Economics class but really taught myself to sew and quilt. I just started sewing fabric together in middle school on my mom’s sewing machine and picked up techniques or invented my own along the way because I have never been interested in making anything the “right way”. I’ve recently decided I’m actually quite good for being self taught sewist! YouTube has been my greatest technical instructor. Retro fabric, The Quilts of Gees Bend, Sherri Lynn Wood, color, and contemporary art have been my inspiration.
Kate Henderson
I am Kate – a quilter, crafter and high school Science teacher. I live in a small town in south-west Western Australia with my husband, our 4 girls and a crazy Labrador.
I’ve been sewing my own clothes since I was a teenager and I even made a quilt back then, but I really got into quilting after my twins were born 16 years ago. Crafting blogs were huge back then and I taught myself using tutorials I found online. I met lots of great people who were so encouraging when I started designing quilts and writing patterns. I was using a lot of pre-cuts, as it was quick to make a quilt when I didn’t have a lot of free time. I started getting a few designs published in magazines and then I got a deal to write my first book using jelly rolls for Martingale.
I still love using pre-cuts, but in the last few years I’ve had more time to explore different techniques and try out new ideas. I could never be bored as a quilter there is always something new to try, or be inspired by. Applique, hand quilting with embroidery thread, foundation paper piecing and improv are all techniques I am enjoying using at the moment. The thing that has remained constant over the years is my love of bright colours.
Andrea Barrios
I was born in Santiago de Chile in 1980, to a creative mother who passed on to me her chromatic intuition, her innate skills for drawing, painting and using a sewing machine. From my father, an engineer, I inherited a love of geometry, accuracy at work and its processes. And through my grandfather, a tailor, I developed a familiarity with textile work and the tools of the trade, which are also part of my family heritage. All these elements added up to my early interest in art and design and have guided my autodidactic exploration on a path to contemporary textile art.
I studied Art Theory and History at the Universidad de Chile, where I took photography, textile and printing classes. I also briefly attended Architecture School at the Universidad Católica de Chile, followed by an internship in CREA Restoration Center. During this period my formal interest in color theory, especially textiles, emerged, which led me to take tailoring and design drawing classes at Paulina Diard Technical School.
My work emerges from the contemplation of textiles, their plasticity and the versatility of their structure, their potential for chromatic experimentation and their kinetic capacity. I work fundamentally with fabric and thread. Nevertheless, my research and processes have deepened the observations related to fibers and tissues through mediums like paint, drawing, photography and digital design. When working with fabric, I plan each piece as a chromatically fluid body, creating a structure – with overlaid parts sewn and intervened with cuts and folds – in which concepts of color, light, movement and time come together. I approach this material from different perspectives and themes, focusing on geometric and abstract compositions initially, later exploring organic and figurative subjects. On the other hand, embroidery on paper has allowed me to expand the possibilities of representation as I use the thread as a line or vector in space, which, in its repetition and superposition, plays with light, shadow and volume, reaffirming the kinetic potential of textiles as both material and medium.
I don’t have a favorite color although I try to use at least one fluor or very bright color in every work. In general, that color tend to be in the range of orange, light green, light blue or pink. The type of fabrics is also very diverse, I just need very light and colorful fabrics with similar composition, so all can be iron with the same temperature. At the same time this ease me the creation of more complex pieces because allow me to work with more layers.
Valerie Goodwin
Valerie S. Goodwin is a mixed media fiber artist and architect whose works of fine art are included in museum and private collections. Most of her work is inspired by a love of aerial views of landscapes and cities. Many of her quilts are based on maps. She began quilting in 1998, but earned to sew from her maternal grandmother in the 1960’s.
Her latest work explores the possibilities of laser cut fabric. She is intrigued by the intricacy and complexity of the lines and shapes this technology can create. This new direction has given her the opportunity to further explore layering and transparency as well as light and shadow by creating what she calls “lace-like” maps. Although it is a new direction, her work still focuses on the geometrical relationships, patterns & ordering principles found in architecture.
She received degrees in architecture from Washington University and Yale University. Her award-winning work has been widely published and exhibited. She also lectures and gives workshops nationally and internationally. For over 26 years, she taught architectural design at Florida A & M University.
