Inspiration – Page 6 – Deidre Adams

ArtQuilt Elements & Breaking New Ground

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!

April 7th, 2008|Inspiration, Installations|4 Comments

Maybe I really am crazy …

Work glove ©2008 Deidre C. Adams

Closely related to the one-shoe phenomenon is the one-glove phenomenon. This particular specimen was located at a new-home construction site near my dad’s house in Albuquerque, where I had been visiting him a couple of weeks ago. In all the time I was growing up in that neighborhood and for many years afterward, there was nothing but sand and hills and tumblewoods for as far as you could see across the street from his house. Now they’re finally starting to put up a development there.

So while on that visit, my husband and my dad and I went for a walk to see what was going on over there in the mesa. I brought along my pocket camera because you never know what great things you might find. Other great finds on that walk were this:

Dead bird ©2008 Deidre C. Adams

And this:

Marlboro Country ©2008 Deidre C. Adams

It was while waiting for me to take the third one that it finally dawned on my dad that there was a pattern going on here. He turned to my husband and in a voice he must have thought was quiet enough for me not to hear, he said “What is she doing? She’s just taking pictures of junk!” Would he ever have thought to ask me about anything that ever motivated me in life? Nah… We finished our walk without the subject coming up again.

April 6th, 2008|Inspiration, Photography|4 Comments

Jeannette DeNicolis Meyer

This piece is one of my favorite works by Jeannette DeNicolis Meyer. It feels like a landscape but isn’t, necessarily. Its quiet beauty and luscious blues evoke a restful peace, yet the rhythm and movement of the circles and color blocks give a sense of movement and energy that keep the eye moving throughout the work. The exquisite red-orange stripe is just the right dash of spice, the icing on the cake. I can’t stop looking at it!

Last September, I had the pleasure of hearing Jeannette speak at a meeting of the Front Range Contemporary Quilters. She is an outstanding speaker, full of warmth and inspiration while at the same time being very organized and focused. Her words and manner are meditative and thoughtful, indicating a sense of purpose to everything she does. Jeannette says:

“ Once I clear the room of critics and exhaust all avenues of procrastination and finally begin, I love how the slow process of working layer by layer involves a rhythm of cerebration and handwork. … I love those moments, when all, or maybe most, is revealed, the design decisions click into place and life is good.”

You probably can’t see it in this tiny photo, but Jeannette uses a combination of hand and machine quilting for a unique result and an interesting contrast of textures. This was one of the things she talked about in her presentation, of using the quilting in a mindful way to enhance and integrate with the rest of the piece, instead of just putting it on randomly as an afterthought.

Winter Diary is featured in the book Speaking in Cloth: 6 Quilters, 6 Voices, by Jeannette and her co-author, Ann Johnston. I highly recommend this book for the beautiful work along with the wonderfully inspirational narrative by each of the 6 artists.

It is available directly from Jeannette on the Books page of her web site.

March 19th, 2008|Inspiration|5 Comments