Upon Reflection, 50 x 29 inches, ©2003 Deidre Adams

Last week, I received two quilts back from a traveling exhibit. Elements from the Front Range Contemporary Quilters was a show of art quilts that was curated by FRCQ member Lorri Flint and handled through Exhibits USA / Mid-America Arts Alliance. The work traveled to various venues throughout the U.S. from 2005-2009.

Since I made this work over six years ago, it was really surprising to see it again. What I was doing then was so different from my current work. In 2003, I was doing a lot of hand-dyeing and discharge, and I was busy making lots and lots of fabric with these methods in order to have a big stash to choose from when designing. Upon Reflection features various fabrics made using the technique of arashi shibori, which I first learned from my friend Shelly DeChantal (sorry, no web site) way back when.

It’s not so much that I made a conscious decision to stop making hand-dyed fabrics, but once I developed my present painting technique, I just found it was a lot more suited to my temperament and the way my brain works. Dyeing can get somewhat technical, with deciding how much of any given color to make, whether to do gradations, figuring out how much dye to use, proportions of other chemicals used, etc. And no getting around it — dyeing is also just plain hard work, especially the hot-water rinsing part. The manual labor aspect of it was kind of hard on the old body. Painting was the answer for me. No advance planning needed, and much more spontaneous to do.

Silent Witness, 50 x 27 inches, ©2003 Deidre Adams

This is the other piece from the Elements show. It represents a kind of transitional piece for my working style, when I started doing more with paint, even experimenting with painting on commercial fabrics. I also started piecing with larger sections of fabric at this time, as I had become rather impatient with the tedious joining of lots of small pieces that I had done prior to this.

Well, it’s nice to have a bit of history for my archives. I’ve been busy the past couple of weeks on design projects. Hope to have some time to get back into the studio tomorrow.

Side note: Don’t you hate it when you have to eat your words? Less than 2 months ago, I just said I wasn’t going to be joining Facebook any time soon. Well, not too long after that, I got an offer I could not refuse and so, with some trepidation, I went ahead and created my Facebook presence. So far, the sky hasn’t fallen, and my e-mail box hasn’t become clogged with spam. It’s even sort of fun. I haven’t totally figured out all the ins and outs of it, though, as there’s a lot to it. Will Twitter be next? It’s hard to imagine that anyone wants to hear my random braindroppings on any kind of regular basis, but I suppose I now realize you should never say “never.”

Façade VI, 38 x 63 inches, ©2008 Deidre Adams

Fabric of Legacies is an annual juried exhibition of art quilts shown at The Lincoln Center in Fort Collins, Colorado, a beautiful center featuring performing arts events along with galleries for visual arts. This year’s show features work from 29 artists. It’s amazing to think that Fabric of Legacies is now in its 28th year, a positive affirmation of public interest in quilts as an art form.

I’m honored to have been invited to show my work as the featured artist for this year’s exhibition. Several of my pieces, including Façade VI, will be displayed in the Walkway Gallery near the other artists’ work for the duration of the exhibition.

Details:
28th Annual Fabric of Legacies Exhibition
July 6 – August 28, 2009
Lincoln Center
417 W. Magnolia St.
Fort Collins, Colorado

Gallery Hours: M-F 8:00 am – 6:00 pm
Selected Saturdays: July 11, Aug. 8 and Aug. 11, 12:00-6:00 pm

There’s an opening reception on Friday, July 10, 5:00-7:00 pm. I’ll also be giving an informal artist’s talk on that day at 6:00 pm. If you’re in the area, hope you can make it!

Adds Up, 77 x 54 inches, ©2005 Cynthia Corbin

The Rocky Mountain Quilt Museum in Golden, Colorado is dedicated to the preservation of the art and history or American quilt making. They maintain a permanent collection of quilts with historical significance and offer exhibitions and educational events in the support of their mission. The exhibitions include both historical as well as contemporary offerings. This past weekend, I had the pleasure of seeing the Speaking in Cloth: 6 Quilters, 6 Voices exhibition in person. I’ve had the book for awhile now, and I wrote about Jeannette DeNicolis Meyer’s work in a previous post. But it was a treat to see all the work in person, as photos usually don’t do justice to textile work, missing the nuances of texture and depth that are visible in the piece when you see it face-to-face.

Jeannette DeNicolis Meyer’s rich color and beautiful hand stitching create a lush environment of subtle light and shadow play on each rich surface. Ann Johnston uses her signature dye-painting techniques along with a diverse vocabulary of stitch patterns for her complex and dynamic compositions. Quinn Zander Corum includes beading and hand-stitching to invite the viewer to come in close for a better look. Her piece “The Back Forty,” consisting of 40 fully-developed small compositions, is a library of colors and techniques reminiscent of the traditional sampler quilt. Nancy Erickson invokes an ancient world where animals rule, realized with her personal iconography of cave paintings and her exhuberant brushwork. Trisha Hassler puts a unique spin on her mixed media work: she combines jagged, rusted steel with counterpoints of hand-dyed, quilted fabric pieces in a harmonious blending of hard and soft. Cynthia Corbin’s work is fascinating for its use of texture, both in the patterning of the fabrics as well as in the amazingly dense machine quilting which covers each piece. Her piece “Adds Up” is shown above, and here is a detail:

My only complaint about the show is that the exhibition space is unfortunately rather small, resulting in a very crowded show with pieces stacked one on top of the other. Some of the smaller works, which would have benefited from an eye-level viewing, were placed too high to see properly. But in any case, I highly recommend going to see this show. It’s up until January 31, 2009.

Also currently on view at the Museum is California Gold, an exhibit of quilts made in the 1870s and 1880s which include a warm yellow fabric of a color nicknamed “California Gold.” The exhibit honors the 150th anniversary of the Forty-Niners, pioneers who risked everything to travel west for the gold rush.

Turkey Tracks, 74 x 85 inches, c. 1885, collection of the Rocky Mountain Quilt Museum

The signage for this piece reads “Woe betide the quiltmaker who decided to stitch this pattern for her son! Turkey Tracks, also known as ‘Wandering Foot,’ was thought to encourage people who slept under it to become endless wanderers … especially boys.”