In this new showcase I’m featuring four Modern Quilters that you will love!
Kathy Ford
I am a fabric artist who comes to my work as an architect, interested in the tension between what can be planned and what flows intuitively as a basis for design. With a leap of faith, I begin a process with the presupposition that order and beauty is THERE, that I just have to be open to seeing it. Staying open to beauty is a moment by moment practice. In my thirty years of quiltmaking I have mastered many skills and love learning new techniques, but my daily work is grounded first in this practice of staying present and allowing beauty to flow through me. I love everything about the process of constructing a quilt. In each step there is an opportunity to observe the emergence of something mysterious and archetypal.
My mother taught me to sew at a young age though I am a self-taught quilter. My work is improvisational. I love to use scraps and discards of all kinds of commercial cloth and cut up clothing in collaboration with one of a kind hand-dyed pieces. I am drawn to making fabric with simple shapes of bits and putting them together with the barest notion of structure, waiting to see what happens. Contemporary designs are built from blocks of either abstract geometrics or representational collage and seeing relationships between them as they are developing. I often use and re-use the same piece of fabric over and over. Like the lightweight wool with periwinkle blue morning glories on a rich black background, or the wavy tiger stripe cotton in black, white, yellow, green, and red, both of which you will find in many of my quilts, in the tradition of a way of making that uses what is closest to home.
Years ago I had a vision to balance creative life between quilting and writing. Now, it will sometimes be years after finishing a quilt that through writing, I can see the thread to what was there in life at the time of making it. A story emerges. Everything is connected.
Tia Salmela
My name is Tia Salmela Keobounpheng. I am an interdisciplinary artist and designer based in Minneapolis, MN – USA. I work with metal, fiber and drawing techniques to create sculpture, installations, and public art. My current body of THREADS work could be described as “geometric unwoven tapestries” on wood.
Made-up of layers, geometry establishes the foundation that determines what is possible for each piece. Color is used to pull patterns forward on the base layer, and in thread, allowing multiple patterns to co-exist. Layers of symbolism hide in plain sight – some extremely personal and others aspirational.
My process is a creative meditation that utilizes various motions of handwork to shift my brainwaves/mindset/behaviors in the direction of decolonization. Away from conforming to the imposed order of dominant culture – “the Earth belongs to me.” And towards embracing that I belong to the vast natural order inherent in interconnected sacred geometry – “I belong to the Earth.”
I develop the work alongside research of history, epigenetics, and my own ancestral lineage as a means of reconciling my celebrated Finnish heritage with my suppressed Sami bloodlines. I view my work as a way to reconcile myself with my ancestors and with my children.
I think of the vertical warp as threads of time, tying me to history and grandmothers I never knew. If then the horizontal weft are the ways my behaviors were shaped by the warp of history, experience, and generational trauma – what can I learn by removing them?
The dense compositions of parallel threads reveal a new understanding of the context that made me, without the baggage of behaviors I developed subconsciously. The unwoven nature of the tapestries allows me to imagine a way forward with greater consciousness, respect for my foundation, and willingness to practice new behaviors. This shift in consciousness is required to face the complex systems that need to change in order to truly address the climate crisis and so many other imbalances in our world.
Anna Brown
My quilting journey began in high school when I took up a part-time job in a fabric shop and realized my love of quilting cotton. After many failed attempts at using the beloved fabric for garments, bags, and other accessories my coworker, very kindly suggested I try something two-dimensional; quilting. She showed me the basics of a quilt sandwich and off I went, learning every other technique by trial and error.
Trial, experimentation, and error took me through college, where I studied printmaking and fiber arts, and beyond while finding any excuse to use the retreat patterns and quilting cotton in my work. As a decade of attempting adulthood, expanding my family, and making ends meet progressed I realized I was no longer prioritizing a creative outlet and I was really missing it. So, I returned to quilting in 2019 and since then it has been a form of self-care for me.
Quilting slows me down, calms me down, and allows me time to relax and reflect while still feeling productive and accomplished. The romantic utilitarian in me loves that I’m practicing an art that has been around for centuries and I hope my quilts will be used and loved for generations. Quilting is a way for me to feel connected with both the past and the future while also living in the moment.
I’m most inspired by nature, music, and the act of creativity itself. I think it’s so important to have a peaceful creative outlet. Whether you consider yourself creative or not; you have creativity inside of you. It’s just part of being human. Finding a way to spend time creating while also recharging is, I think, crucial to feeling balanced in the fast-paced world we live in today. My hope is to help others discover quilting as their creative outlet, gain confidence in their creativity, and use it as a tool for practicing mindfulness.
Ai Kijima
Every fabric tells a story. Touching it tells you what it is made of, how it was woven, and where it is from. The way its colors, patterns, and images dance across its surface, tells you about the people that made it, their history, what they care about. Fabrics are world-travelers and I love learning from the stories they tell, traveling the world with them.
My love of fabrics began early. My grandmother taught me to sew and knit, and as a child I rode my bicycle down the streets of Tokyo to fabric shops, spending hours listening to their stories. Art didn’t
happen until later. When I was in high school I started to draw by copying images from magazines. My teacher was very impressed, which surprised me. She encouraged me to apply to art school. There I started to imagine a career as an artist. I also saw that fabrics could be used to make art, that I could combine and collage their stories to tell stories of my own.
In cities like Tokyo, Chicago, New York, and Istanbul, my life and my art has been inspired by many cultures. Living among such diverse people has grown my visual vocabulary and, very importantly, deepened my respect for others, for other ways of being. But looking back at Japan, I can see how it has shaped me. I was taught that all things have a soul to respect and care for. They should be re-used and cherished instead of casually thrown away. This is why so many different kinds of fabric are in my art. Also I learned reverence for the past, for what it can tell us, and to look at the world through the wider lens of history. These philosophies guide me every day.
Today I am using old Japanese indigo kimonos. In Japan, indigo blue has been used for over a thousand years, but I love that indigo is also important to many other cultures. I don’t know how these new works will turn out, but I’m sure they will combine a Japanese sensibility with a multicultural mind, and art with fabrics–sharing their stories while I tell my own.