GALLERIES

**IMPROVISATIONAL QUILTS

**ABANDONED HOUSES

**QUILTS WITH PEOPLE

**ASTRONOMY QUILTS

OTHER QUILTS

Click on Title to go to those quilts

What Do You/I See

I am an outsider artist.  Self-taught for over 70 years.  No professional training as an artist, none as a quilter.  I have made art and quilts through a time when quilts were sometimes deemed to be art, although many making those quilts believed that they were making art all along, that the coverings they made with images of their children and houses and pets and gardens or with elegant abstractions they did not intend simply to keep someone warm.  I have always made these images with intent other than heat, and made them with gratitude that as a child I learned the craft I would need. 

I quilt what is around me and I work in series.  I live in an isolated part of the U.S., in one of America’s few exclaves.  The world of Point Roberts is oceans, skies, clouds, stars, trees, birds, flowers, raccoons.  My community specializes in houses that have passed beyond ownership, and I have made many images of these abandoned houses, 17 of which now belong to the Point Roberts Historical Society and are on permanent display in our community center after having been exhibited in gallery shows.

I have looked up into our densely starred night skies and created a 52-panel quilt of our galaxy, which NASA chose twice for its Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD) website, the only fiber art that has been displayed there (as far as I know).  This large piece was also shown as a special exhibit at an annual meeting of the International Quilt Association, and spent a year in residence at the Lick Observatory in California.  It has also been shown in more conventional art/quilt settings.

Something is happening every week in the plum trees that populate my yard, so I made a 48-panel quilt of one tree, beginning in the dead of winter and working through its phases of leaves, buds, flowers, visitors, fruits, lichens, and changing colors from spring through fall, to its return to barrenness. The plum tree quilt has been exhibited in both British Columbia and Washington art galleries and fiber art exhibits.

I quilt my life, including a decade-by-decade image of who I have been and who I have become.  I create images of the political world, investigating the movers and shakers who shape both the larger world and our personal ones.  I make quilts vaguely reminiscent of traditional quilts, which include tiny portraits of the lives around me, of animals, flowers, trees.

During the past decade, I find myself consciously working in the space between the craft tradition and the fiber art present.  Working in a larger format (so that the works are always useful as coverings) my most recent series of 30+ quilts are improvisational in the same sense as jazz: beginning with a spare theme, a catch of melody, a sudden thought about a single block or a special scrap of fabric, and building around that to create something original, coherent, evocative, lasting, and useful.

I am by intention an outsider to the art world and the quilt world because each of those worlds tends to claim the whole.  I keep a hand out to each.  My work is not easily compared to other art forms because it is simultaneously 2- and 3-dimensional, and so it is like neither painting nor sculpture.  Like conventional quilting, my work is attentive to craft and tradition, but it downplays the historical use of pattern and repetition.  Exploiting the range of textures achievable with fibers gives the finished work a kind of schizophrenic appeal: here are textures that beg the viewer to touch the finished work; yet it is work guarded by the exhortation, “Do Not Touch.”  

These quilts neither deny their craft history nor seek entry into the world of “the painted word.”  They can provide warmth or decoration; they can hang on a wall in a home or in a museum.  Such a quilt can be a life-long gift to a new baby or a wedding couple, or a momentary shroud for the newly dead.  This is where I have claimed space in this alignment of art and craft...JWR




Go to: QUILT GALLERIES