Shades of White, 48 x 48 inches, ©2007 Deidre C. Adams

This past weekend I’ve been at the joint SAQA/SDA conference, Breaking New Ground, which was held in conjunction with the opening of ArtQuilt Elements in Wayne, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Philadelphia. This was a great opportunity for me to meet a lot of people whom I’ve been talking to via e-mail for some time – so nice to be able to put faces together with names.

Shades of White, above, was juried into the ArtQuilt Elements show. This was the first time I’ve ever gotten into this show after several years of trying, and I thought the quality of the work in this year’s exhibit was outstanding – so I’m very pleased to have been included. The conference events included a tour of some of the area’s current fiber art exhibits and happenings, including a stop at the Snyderman/Works Gallery, where the 6th International Fiber Biennial is on view through April 23. This is an amazing show; there’s so much here that it was impossible to take it all in within the short amount of time we had there. Some of my favorites were the pieces by Dorothy Caldwell (see some of her work here and here) and Matthew Harris, whose work I’d seen in Surface Design Magazine, but can’t seem to find much about him on the web.

We also stopped at the Gross McCleaf Gallery to see some amazing work by Emily Richardson and Judith James. Emily’s fabric constructions are very much like paintings, as they are made from painted and pieced fabrics with a wide range of opacity which results in a rich layered effect with an intriguing contrast of pastel and very strong colors. She was there in the gallery answering questions, and I enjoyed talking with her about her process. Judith had been one of the keynote speakers at the conference the day before, so I had seen slides of her work during her talk. What really struck me was their size – for some reason, while watching the slide presentation, I had gotten the idea that they were very large, so I was surprised at their quite modest scale when seen in person at the gallery. They are still wonderful, though – perhaps even more so, for the attention to the tiniest detail and the imaginative way she uses the muted and understated colors of the discharge process in her compositions.

I’m also taking one of the workshops offered as part of the symposium. I thought as long as I was going as far as Philadelphia, I needed it to be longer than a 2-day trip to make it worth the travel. So I’m taking Leslie Nobler Farber’s “Digital Approaches” workshop to try some new techniques in printing images onto various substrates. More on that later – I’m getting very tired of computers. Unfortunately, the timing of this event fell into a very busy time at school. One of my classes this semester is “Video Art I,” and my first “rough cut” is due on Thursday. So I already have my laptop with me since I needed it for the digital printing workshop, but I also had to lug a 500mb external disk drive along so I can work on my video project in my hotel room in the evenings. Some fun!