Ps and Qs, Part 2

Lorie McCown is another member of Fiber Transformed with pieces in the museum exhibit. She recycles old clothes for her work by using reclaimed fabrics and adding photo image transfers during a layering process and enhancing the work with large hand stitches.  Her work is meant to tell the personal stories of the people in the photos.

Swedish artist, Lotta Helleberg, uses eco-dying and botanicals in her mono-printed works.  She is known for her negative images, as well as combining them with a ghost image, or as in “Pecan, Spring” where each print was a single image. 

She also had this lovely cyanotype print in the show.

And this one.

Graphic Artist. Jill Kerttula, uses photos printed on fabric and then heavily embellishes the work with thread and other found items.

This one is called Ginkgo Street.

Sculptor Mary Beth Bellah contributed two quilted spider web pieces to the exhibit. These photos are from the piece titled “Autumnal Watch”.  

She sprayed the web with an ink and then holding up the fabric walked through the web picking up the image as she moved and the web made contact with the fabric.  She believes in “more is more” and thus further embellished her pieces with lace and mixed media constructed spiders.

Elizabeth very much enjoyed the explanation and discussion of the work in the exhibit as it certainly helped in understanding the artist’s mission and motive in creating each piece.  This exhibit is scheduled to be at the museum until May 20, 2017.

Ps and Qs, Part 1

After the lecture at the Virginia Quilt Museum by Dawn Flores about The Forest Project, the museum brought in box lunches for everyone and then we reconvened in an upstairs exhibit space for the Ps and Qs exhibit curated by Jill Jensen.  Jill led us around the exhibit telling us about the P (Printing) aspects of the different pieces in the exhibit. The Q stands for Quilting.

Jill is part of a group called “Fiber Transformed” which was recently highlighted in the most current edition (April/May 2017) of Quilting Arts Magazine starting on page 30.  A wood block print carver, she made this large block,

which was printed with black oil based ink on white fabric and then painted in with the blue water based textile paint for the water and boats.  She had to pay special attention when carving that the left and right sides of her block would be continuous ends for her prints.  The pieces were all printed prior to painting in the color and sewing so that the seam allowance would not interfere with the print process by creating a raised lip.

Continuing on around the room, she had two other pieces in the exhibit, the farm field scene which was also printed from one solid wood block;

and the baby Christening dress which was too old and fragile to salvage as a textile; so she painted it to make it stiff, rolled paint on the dress itself with a roller and then made a mono-print of the dress onto a piece of fabric which had been eco-dyed with both “Silver Dollar” and “Baby Blue” eucalyptus leaves.  She has used prints made from the dress in several other pieces of work but this was the only one in this exhibit. 

Work from 4 other artists in the exhibit will be shared in tomorrow's post.  The Fiber Transformed group is made up of  6 fiber artists living and working in Virginia and includes Jill Jensen, Mary Beth Bellah  (founder of the group), Jill Kerttula, Lorie McCown, Lotta Helleberg, and Wrenn Solcum.

The Forest Project

Elizabeth went to Harrisonburg, Virginia on Saturday, March 25, 2017 for a lecture and visit at the Virginia Quilt Museum.  The lecturer was Dawn Flores of The Forest Project.

Behind Dawn’s house near Richmond, Virginia is a park and a piece of land which was going to be developed.  Dawn shared how she and her neighbors used positive advocacy to develop relationships with the family who owned the land, the developers and the builders to document the process of change-over-time using art mediums.  Along the journey she was able to add professional and amateur artists, school children (Collegiate School Residency), filmmakers, and re-claimers to the process enabling many people to heal from the experience of witnessing a loss of trees from their environs.  Keeping a sense of realism to the project by grounding herself in understanding all sides of the story, from knowing that even her own neighborhood had once been a forest, to the respect the developers showed when they visited her disassembling and re-purposing the various parts of the old farm house allowed for a powerful sense of grief to turn to a sense of good coming from many different aspects of the experiences.

What drove Elizabeth to go to the lecture was Dawn’s printing of images from the Forest Project.  Hearing about these in the quilt museum’s newsletter peaked her curiosity.  Dawn showed photographs she had taken and then manipulated in order to create new images which could be considered patterns suitable for printing onto fabric. Dawn then sent these images to Spoonflower for printing on cotton sateen. 

While she can now be considered a quilter, Dawn was a painter who is associated with the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Studio School and other institutions as a teacher of watercolor and photography, especially those with a bend towards botanicals.  It was fascinating to learn how she took her photos and transformed them with computer software all the way to the place where she could then have ecofriendly, vegetable dyed fabric in hand to use not only for herself, but for other artists to also buy and use. 

Currently, she is recruiting quilt artists to use the fabric printed with her images to make quilts which can be photographed in the environs of The Forest Project, as well as possibly turning into a curated show.  

If you go to Dawn’s website, be sure to click on the link for The Forest Project so you understand the vast scope of this project as each facet has a page all its own.

Current Exhibits at VQM

Over the weekend Sue had an opportunity to visit the Virginia Quilt Museum in Harrisonburg, VA, for the opening of the "Inspired By the National Parks" exhibit and artists reception.  It was a double treat as she has TWO quilts currently on exhibit, the one in the National Parks group and the other in the "Along the Spice Route" exhibit still on display.  How cool is that??  All current exhibits run through September 10.

We started with the Spice Route quilts, since Sue's friend Kathy had not seen that exhibit in person yet.  The gift shop offered this reminder of the exhibit.

Here is Sue with her quilt, Mustard Seed.

Some other views of the display - the "log cabin" room.

And gallery walls; Elizabeth's quilt is in the corner on the left.

Moving on to the main floor, we found the a portion of the parks quilt exhibit in the room that normally houses Civil War quilts and artifacts.

The exhibit covers the walls floor to ceiling, windows too!

There is great impact seeing all these wonderful quilts blanketing the walls.

However it is a bit more challenging to see those near the bottom close up.

Sue's quilt was in this room, the Scarlet Globemallow flowers at the bottom representing Mesa Verde National Park.

The other half of the exhibit was in the upstairs hallway and small exhibit room on the 2nd floor.  The small room had the best lighting.  Of course the lighting in all the galleries is controlled so as not to damage the textiles.

It was a great day for an outing as we did some row by row shop hopping on the way to the museum.  More on that in another post.

Along the Spice Route at the Virginia Quilt Museum

On Saturday, June 11, 2016 Elizabeth went to Harrisonburg, Virginia, for an Artist Reception marking the Virginia Quilt Museum’s display of  Along the Spice Route. Both Elizabeth and Sue have quilts in this exhibit but Sue was unable to attend. 

The quilts are mostly displayed on white walls in the basement gallery of the museum which is located in an historic home in downtown Harrisonburg. Elizabeth likes seeing them displayed against a white background. There is one room called the log cabin room where the walls are a light wood and some quilts are displayed there, but she likes them best on the white because the warm tones of the wood absorb some of the light and provide less contrast.

This is the fourth time she has seen the exhibit, twice on white walls in a gallery style setting, twice on black drapes in a show setting. The white walls seem to show off the vibrant colors in these quilts quite nicely and are her preference although the hanging in Fredericksburg at the Sewing and Quilt expo was dramatic with the quilts hanging in two long rows.

The reception hosted by the museum was very nice and it was a treat to get to meet many of the other quilters who contributed to this exhibit.

Other posts about this exhibit were in August 2015 at the New England World Quilt Show, October 2015 at the Sewing and Quilting Expo, and November 2015 at the Manassas Center for the Arts.  It's always a thrill to see your own work hanging in an exhibit!