Luke Haynes, Ian Berry & Nancy Crow

I hope the combination of the above three piques your interest, for it was an interesting juxtaposition of quilters.  We also had SAQA in the same space, as well as Mirjam Pet-Jacobs, with her pieces on wastefulness.

I kept track of who was where by looking at my charts:

(You can click to enlarge them, but really, they are just my scribbles.)

These artists were all in the Space des Tisserands, a large room that had been subdivided to accommodate all these quilters.  While some of these pictures are tiled in groups, you can click on any individual image to see a larger version.

First up is Ian Berry.  Yes, he’s the blue jeans guy.  He cuts up blue jeans into shapes and tones and colors and contrasting pieces, then re-assembles them via gluing, into recognizable images.  We had a few minutes before the crush of fans wafted in again to visit with him, and found him a lovely conversationalist.  We talked about quilting, what else?

Then he was called in for a group picture, one of many I saw him do that day. I wish I would have snapped the photo of the group of ladies posing on the blue tiles in front of the washing machines in the laundromat.  I didn’t know you could step into a work of art that way, but no one was stopping them.

Next up is Luke Haynes (self-portrait, above), who burst onto the scene about three years ago, and remade the quilt world into his world, by utilizing traditional art studio techniques.  This means that he uses assistants to do the work, but they work under his name, and in this way he mounted his Log Cabin show.  At QuiltCon 2016, some quilters weren’t too happy with him, for to them this smacked of the subsuming of “women’s work” into the male creative world.  But Luke is a happy guy (really fun to hear him talk, and I admire his creativity) and he then morphed into this show (of course, this is all MY view of things–he may have a different take), which was called a collaboration of quilters.  Or Quiltllaborations, as his exhibit was called.

Top Row: [Collab #8] Indigo DWR by Luke Haynes and Rachael Dorr (2017)  90″ square
Second Row: [Collab #6] Polka by Luke Haynes and Libs Elliot (2015) 71″ square
Third Row: [Collab #5] Kills It with Fire by Luke Haynes and Libs Elliot (2015) 68″ square
Fourth Row (L): Untitled   It is one of my favorites, so please click on it to enlarge; however, it is not quilted.  Still cool, though.
Fourth Row (R): Another wedding ring, but I didn’t find the title card.  Some of his were nearly on the ground, or around a corner.

Nancy Crow, who helped co-found the Dairy Barn (in previous post) also had a few quilts  there under her name; I assume they were either colleagues or students.  One of my fantasies in my younger quilting years was to travel to Ohio and take one of her two-week classes.  I have just about every  book of hers, and screwed up my nerve to read her class supply list.  I was completely intimidated and decided that wasn’t the direction I’d be going.  But still, she is one of my Quilting Fairy Godmothers, although she probably wouldn’t like me calling her that.  (She is a serious quilter–she has a quilting studio with multiple GIANT design walls, scads of tables holding yards and yards of fabric).  Serious.

Sea Ice–Cook Inlet, by Bonne M. Bucknam (USA)  79″ long

Conflict No. 7 by Judy Kirpich (USA)  76″ square  If you’ll remember, she had a quilt in the Quilt National exhibit titled Conflict No. 5 Mugging.  I know that Crow encourages those she teaches to work in a series.  If this is two quilts away from No. 5, Kirpich seems like the anguish has eased (if you can read that into a quilt)

Thirty-four? by Helen McBride Richter (USA) 75″ wide 70″ long  Did I mention that the name of this exhibit was Mastery: Sustaining Momentum?

Colleen Kole’s Time Fragments #11 In the Distance (USA 2015)  82″ wide 83″ long  Detail is below, that shows the really interesting quilting.

Okay, I didn’t love this exhibit of Mirjam Pet-Jacobs, with her pieces on wastefulness, but that could have been just my mindset, or how things struck me that day, for she is a talented textile artist with many exhibits on many different topics (please visit her website to see the range of her artistry). Her exhibit was called “What a Waste!”  The above (on the floor in the middle of the gallery) is the waste that came out of a creative quilt studio.  [Update: She wrote to me to explain that this was a three-years accumulation, which made it feel more real, for after three years, perhaps my waste stream would be the same?]  Perhaps I don’t like to be reminded that there is lots of waste in quilting, and how many of us donate doggie beds full of scraps to our local humane shelter?  My hand isn’t up.  I try to recycle my scraps, using them, sharing them.  But I do know that our textile has long been known for waste–just type in “waste in the textile industry” and see the listings.  We try to ignore all that.  Maybe the way it was presented to me just didn’t make my heart leap?  Or maybe I don’t want to know about this?  Does our cycle of quilt fabric collections — almost too many to keep track of — contribute to this waste?

You can see that it caused me to think.  Also in this building were the quilts from SAQA–Studio Art Quilt Association.  They never let us photograph their quilts in stateside shows, so I felt positively delirious to be able to take photos of these quilts.  That’s in the next post about the European Patchwork Meeting.  I have created a main page, with a listing of posts.