In this new showcase I’m featuring four Modern Quilters that you will love!
Miglė Slėnytė
Hi, my name is Miglė Slėnytė – Pliadė. I found myself being a quilt maker quite recently. It has been a year since I have started patchworking pretty accidentally after I got more curious about the process of my grandmothers quilts. Being into crafts and making something with my own hands always made most sence for me so another craft wasn’t absolutely unexpected for me, but pretty surprising to be honest. I started without having any idea about it but picked up pretty fast by making myself couple of jackets and was making quilts and quilted vests after few months.
I mostly get my inspiration in the world around me. Sometimes my color pallets comes from a hike with my family and sometimes it is inspired by one moment at cinema. With quilting I came to peace with all the colors and realized absolutely all of it are beautiful it just have to be nurtured differently.
I love experimenting with classic and modern patterns. I start with few colors and couple of different patterns and then I just go from there adding more colors and piecing patterns together. My husband called my style “tamed chaos” once and I think it is pretty accurate :).
Nita Monteiro
My name is Nita Monteiro. I am a woman, a mother, a visual artist, and a podcaster. I’ve spent my childhood in Angra dos Reis, a city by the sea in Rio de Janeiro / Brazil. At the age of seventeen, I moved to São Paulo, the city where I live and work.
My first contact with art was through my mother and grandmother. My grandmother was a seamstress and also had a hobby of painting flowers and landscapes. My mother is an architect and she always liked to do arts and crafts with me, we played with making models, building Christmas ornaments, decorating clothes, and so many other things.
Like my mother, I graduated in Architecture and Urbanism, but I never actually worked in this field. My passion has always been the visual arts. During college, I worked as a curator’s assistant at the Museum of Contemporary Art at the University of São Paulo, where I had my first contact with the magic of putting together an exhibition. In my spare time, I attended the printmaking studio of artist Kika Levy and whenever I could, I took courses at the College of Fine Arts.
After graduating, I worked for a few years in an art gallery in São Paulo. And in this journey, I had contacted with countless works of art and artists that inspired me to become an artist like them. In 2019, I chose to focus exclusively on my artwork. That’s when I started to sew, rescuing this practice that was already so present in my family.
In my work, I use materials found in our domestic and daily life. I use objects that were donated, thrown away, or acquired at flee markets such as: clothes, sheets, dish towels, tablecloths, old crockery and tiles, etc. That is, objects that were used and loaded with stories and memories. I also use fabrics sourced from textile waste stores and naturally dyed fabrics. My research base is ancestral and popular knowledge, as well as crafts done, in large part, by female hands. I create from the materials I find and from the stories I hear. I love to hear and tell stories, and these stories somehow end up appearing in my works.
Danielle Cukierman
I have always liked to work with textures. My paintings and objects always had different ones.
I started embroidering in 2021 after Covid left me in ICU for ten days. During my recovery, my hands were shaking, but I insisted on using them to incorporate embroideries in my research as a visual artist. I chose a punch needle to start.
As an artist, I deal with the idea of “paths.” I would love to find a “safe path” to be followed, and through my embroideries, I create” crossroads” and shapes that suggest routes and symbols. I always ask: which guides would be better to follow: Spiritual, scientific, physical, etc.?
My favorite color is green; many of my works have several green shades. I am a self-taught artist, and I started watching tutorials on the internet. They gave a good starting point!
