In this new showcase I’m featuring four Modern Quilters that you will love!
Norma Slabbert
Norma Slabbert is a quilt maker and writer from New Zealand who makes quilts that reflect the life
she lives. Growing up in a home with a single mother who had a demanding medical career at a
mission station in Africa, she never learned needlework skills as a child.
She was inspired by the seventies patchwork craze that swept the world, but lacking needle
skills, she started doing playful fabric collage, inspired by the work of her pre-school class.
During a mid-career break, Norma backpacked through Europe, to visit major galleries and
museums to study art and quilt making. She bought her first quilt book and taught herself to quilt
while working as a gallery curator.
Norma returned to university in midlife, to fulfill a passion for writing. At journalism school
the professor drilled in the facts and critical thinking and after qualifying as a journalist, her quilts
turned darker in tone as she questioned world matters and reflected on life and emotional truths.
Norma migrated to New Zealand during the nineties and as a migrant, her work often
comments on coming and going, place and displacement, and the space between. A recurring motif
in her work is the checkerboard pattern. For her, it is a symbol of home or what is underfoot.
The disruption of migration and searching for home, sparked a series based on the Welcome
theme with the statement: “Leaving home is a journey without end. Migrants often find themselves
unwelcome and spiritually homeless when they discover the place they have journeyed to is not
theirs, and the one they have left, cannot be recovered.”
Norma calls herself a quilt maker – not an artist. She describes her quilts as wall quilts, not
art quilts. She believes it is up to the viewer to decide whether it is art or not. For her, it is all about
taking the viewer to a place, evoke an emotion, and open a conversation.
For Norma, a well-chosen colour palette can conjure emotional feelings and support the
theme of a quilt. Her early quilts were bright and playful, in photogenic out-of-the-tube primary
colours. But after 35 years of quilting, she prefers to use neutral and subdued colours to evoke a
contemplative stillness.
Norma has published a number of books and is now working towards her fifth solo
exhibition. The working title of her exhibition is ‘Homeplace’ – a theme that responds to our current
moment. On show will be a block-of-the-day lockdown quilt. Moved by the enormity of the crisis,
the blocks capture the mood and emotion of lockdown, the essence of the day, and her intense joy
and appreciation of home, rituals, and the beauty of every day.
Dina
My name is Dina. I was born in the Soviet Union. I live in Denmark.
I have worked as an investigative journalist and writer for more than 25 years. My books and other
works have been published in Denmark, the United Kingdom, the USA, Brazil, and Germany.
Some of my writings are used as teaching materials in high schools and universities. I am also a mystic and spiritual practitioner living an ordinary family life. I rarely talk about these facets of me in public.
In 2018, I was struck by lightning during a severe thunderstorm. I didn’t just survive. The lightning
strike gave me the experience of enlightenment – the same one that all Buddhas have lived through.
To say that I died and was born again is to say nothing. I was born with an awareness of my true
nature, Higher Self, with the knowledge of who I am and who we all are.
This experience opened an unusual perception in me which science calls multiple synesthesia. I
began to perceive many things as color and as multi-colored light – people, objects, music, sounds,
tastes, and touches. This new quality inspired me to start my exploration of Color. That is how I
started to learn textile arts.
Why textile arts? I do not know. I just follow the call. I use patchwork as a tool for the
manifestation of multi-colored light in matter.
I am developing a genre of contemporary textile iconography.
In this regard, I started working on the project called “Enlightened Universe”. This work will take
several years, perhaps. I enjoy creating artifacts for healing and transformation. All my work is
done in the spirit of love and blessings. Creativity and spiritual practices are the same for me, and
they are a tool to help the consciousness to rise higher and to realize the Divine.
What else inspires me? Not just my own experiences, but also mysticism in general, mythology,
sacred geometry, symbolism. As an eclectic artist, I love to unite everything with everything: east
and west, heaven and earth, spirit and matter.
My long-term goal includes everybody’s well-being, so I try to make my art serve this purpose.
Carolyn Murphy
I grew up in a family of makers – if something needed to be sewn, painted, reupholstered, knitted, cooked or renovated, chances are one of us was busy doing it. I inherited this drive, to make, to do.
In the 90s I found quilting; a magazine article about Denyse Schmidt’s gorgeous modern quilts hit a nerve. I got busy. I borrowed books about quilting from the library and taught myself this new, exciting language. I’ve been quilting ever since (almost 25 years!), first for family and friends, then for my children’s clothing and accessories business, Baby Ben, and now for my new venture, Studio Quilts.
There is something about the nature of quilts, the tactile pleasure of them, the riveting richness of their colour and design. They exist at the collision of necessity and art: the built-in intention of care, of warmth, of comfort, and the thrill of artful impact. They are as practical as a blanket, and as exciting as a painting.
I find my inspiration everywhere: modern art and architecture, fashion, design, travel. A stone pathway, boats in a harbour, leaves, flowers, a doorway, an old photograph: these are all jumping off points for me. They get the wheels turning, and pretty soon I’m sketching and cutting and sewing. Improvisation is my favourite quilting language. Fabric is my paintbox.
