Redefined

Becoming a "Real Artist"

Years ago, I read a science fiction story by Bob Shaw, called "Light of Other Days", that introduced me to the concept of slow glass. The glass was supposedly engineered to slow the light passing through it, so what appeared on the other side of the glass was, in essence, a view of the past. The slow glass could be made in various "time thicknesses" (I made up that term, but it describes the effect). I often think of people as slow glass, especially children. You put something into them and it might not come back out again for many years. One reason that you can usually tell work of young art students is that the slow glass isn't very thick yet. The experiences haven't built up inside them sufficiently to provide the depth that you see in the work of more mature artists.

Much of the time now, I feel like very thick slow glass. All the thoughts, feelings and sights that have passed through me are now reappearing on the other side and you can see them in my work. I see the Art Deco and Victorian influences from my New York childhood. I see science and technology, a remnant from my former professions. I see the highest highs and the lowest lows of my life.

Being self-taught, there are times I feel like I'm swimming in a sea of artists who have their MFA degrees. They know how to do everything from charcoal drawings to massive bronze sculptures. They can critique an artwork while blindfolded, even with both hands tied behind their backs. They are fluent in Artspeak and know how to dress in an appropriately creative manner every day. I already have a Masters degree (in audiology) and have no desire to go back to school again for that length of time, so I have to ask myself whether an MFA would improve my art over and above what I'm already doing. No, it wouldn't, because I don't want to have my work graded by someone else. This is my journey and I'm the only one who can tell if it's right.

In 1999, I made a very conscious decision to leave traditional quilting and explore art quilting. That description worked for a few years, but then it dawned on me that it wasn't the quilting part that was important anymore, but the expression of ideas. The quilting became the vehicle for that expression because I already knew the techniques and it was a very versatile medium. It was about that time that I began to think of myself as an artist. Not as a quilter or as an art quilter, but as an artist. This is how I feel inside of me now. I look at the world differently than I did before.

I suppose I could be doing something else with my life that would be more profitable, but my art continues to emerge from me at the strangest times. That slow glass is finally revealing everything what's been inside, but it's coming out all mixed together. It doesn't really matter whether I have a fine arts degree or not, because this is what I've become. I think I'm finally a Real Artist.

2007 - Looking back (and forth) at my exhibition record

Here's where you could have seen my art this year. Some of it is still there. Please go see it!

Extruded was in Stretching the Threads, Atlantic Center for the Arts (New Smyrna Beach, Florida) back in April. Mary McBride, the curator, is a talented fiber artist herself and always puts on one heckuva fiber show. According to the art reviews in the paper, this was the best one yet and I was honored to be represented. Here is an installation picture. Mary said that people walked around on the driveway outside the window to see how the back of this was made.

Tangled started the year still on display in Quilt Visions, a very prestigious art quilt exhibit at the Oceanside Museum of Art (Oceanside, California). Feel free to buy the catalog here. This work was also  in Ana 35, an all-media show of contemporary art at the Holter Museum of Art (Helena, Montana) from June through August. I wish I had installation pictures of this show, as it is a good one, but this was one of those times when I sent out the quilt and got it back, without any printed information, pictures or website presence about the exhibit itself.

Knitted was first shown at a four-person exhibit at The Fiber Studio (Wichita, Kansas) in May and June. It is currently on exhibit as part of Fabric of the Imagination at the Visions Art Quilt Gallery (San Diego, California) through January 13th, so you still have a chance to see it. After I shipped it to San Diego, they had the terrible wildfires in the area and I was really scared it might go up in smoke, but the gallery was safe and so was Knitted.

Connected was displayed at a number of exhibits this year. As part of a SAQA exhibit called Transformations, it was shown at the International Quilt Festival (Chicago, Illinois) and the Grants Pass Museum of Art (Grants Pass, Oregon). It was also chosen as the cover art for the catalog. Later, it.was invited to be shown at the Wichita Art Museum (Wichita, Kansas). The official title of the exhibit is Quilts from the Prairie Quilt Guild, but I have trouble putting anything on my resume that says "quilt guild", so I've chosen to utterly ignore it. It's still at the museum until January 6th.

Prepackaged was shown in Fiber Directions, Wichita Center for the Arts (Wichita, Kansas). You can see installation photos here. I was a little surprised to be accepted, as this is the fourth time in a row they have used Jason Pollen as a juror. He's a great guy, but very focused on surface design, but the success of my work doesn't rely on surface design techniques at all, so I was glad to finally enter something he liked. Of course, it wasn't the one I thought he would pick. I thought he's choose Knitted, if anything.

Discombobulated was shown at the Visions Art Quilt Gallery (San Diego, California) as part of the Thomas Contemporary Quilt Collection. Del Thomas is one of my favorite people in the art quilt world because of the tremendous personal support she gives the artists whose work she owns. She still allows me to enter and exhibit Discombobulated even though she's owned it for five years. I will always be grateful for her friendship.

Emotional Entanglement was in Covers Blown! at the Alice C. Sabatini Gallery (Topeka, Kansas). This was yet another great Kansas Art Quilters show curated by Linda Frost. I was very pleased that they hung it freestanding instead of against the wall. You can see an installation picture here.

Popped is travelling with a Kansas Art Quilters exhibit, Altered Views. This year, it was exhibited at the LPL Gallery and the Unity Gallery, both in Lawrence, Kansas and at the Irene B. French Gallery in Merriam, Kansas. This was my attempt at a pop up quilt, but I forgot that it wasn't really recognizable as a pop up once it was open and on display. Live and learn. I'd like to do a pop up again sometime, but I'd have to think about displaying the final result a little more.

Post Rock Country, Kansas is currently on display in the office of Governor Kathleen Sebelius (Topeka, Kansas). This is another great exhibit through Kansas Art Quilters and Linda Frost.

In June, I was privileged to be in a 4-person show at the Fiber Studio in Wichita, Kansas. I displayed four large works there, Forest Floor, Knitted, Erupted and Pinpointed. Thanks to Marilyn Grisham, the gallery owner, for including me.

Governor's Exhibit

I received these pictures today from Linda Frost, the Exhibition Chair for Kansas Art Quilters. My quilt, Post Rock Country, Kansas, was chosen to be featured on the first visible wall in the Kansas governor's outer office. It will be on display there until the end of April.

Post Rock Country, Kansas

In previous posts, I admitted to having a sordid, yet colorful past as a traditional quilter. Life seems to go in cycles and for some reason, that past has been coming back to haunt me recently. Not only did I just complete a project that harkens back to my "picture quilt" days, but I'm also teaching with and exhibiting some of older quilts. Perhaps I needed to see where I've been in order to appreciate where I'm going.

This is a quilt called Post Rock Country, Kansas, finished in 2000 after about a year's worth of work. Unfortunately, this was back before I had a professional photographer, so the picture isn't very good. However, it is large and quite three dimensional. The spiral at the top is actually a separate quilt, which you can see it in the detail picture. I have to admit that I changed some things about this quilt two years later, after this picture was taken. Most notably, I added a farm out in the field, changed and improved the tall grasses at the bottom and added quilte a bit of shading, especially to the fence posts and field.

The barbed wire started as six different weights of white cotton yarn. I painted the yarn black, then tied knots in it, changing to smaller yarn as the fence went off into the distance.The eagle was threadpainted (entirely stitched by machine) and it was such a large image that it took me eight days to finish. The larger butterflies and other details were created the same way.

I entered this quilt into two large shows that year (Paducah and Houston) and it wasn't accepted into either one. After that, I thought this quilt would stay on my living room wall for the rest of its life, but twas not to be.

First, this artwork was juried into Encrustations, a 2002 North Carolina exhibit for embellished quilts and that show was chosen to be a special exhibit at the Houston show later that year. Ha! Take that, you shortsighted Houston jurors from 2000, it was shown there anyway! I am dancing on your heads.

In 2005, this quilt was juried into an annual exhibit in Ohio. The theme was "Rural Roots and Mysteries" and it won Best of Show. I wasn't creating this kind of artwork anymore, but I was still very pleased that this work was getting recognition. The eagle had landed.

Ready for the big news? Several days ago, the exhibitions chair for Kansas Art Quilters  received a request from the Kansas governor's office asking for ten quilts to display on their walls. Post Rock Country, Kansas is one of the quilts that was chosen for that honor. It will be on display there from December 5th through the end of April, 2008. The funny thing is that I always felt this quilt should be displayed in the governor's office and it's almost surreal to know that it will truly be there. Key the Twilight Zone music, please.

Summing up my art career... so far

Next Monday, I will send off my application for an artist's fellowship from the Kansas Arts Commission. As part of the paperwork, I need to provide a one-page artist's statement "connecting the artist's work with process and career path". My usual artist's statement is much shorter, so I wrote a new one and later realized this is the perfect wrap up to the blog entries which documented my art career. Here is what I wrote.

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Artist's Statement
In 1993, I took some classes in traditional quilting and quickly became obsessed. My progress as a quilter was so rapid that I was soon teaching and winning major awards, but after a few years, I was making so many beginner samples that I was being dragged backwards artistically. In the summer of 1999, I made the conscious decision to stop teaching and leave traditional quilting so I could concentrate on creating art, using quilting as my medium.

After taking workshops and experimenting with materials and processes for a year or two, I created Discombobulated, which became the seminal work for my current style. It was the first time I had used quilting to create a three dimensional work and the first time I treated the quilt as if it were raw material rather than a surface to be decorated. This was a major turning point for me. In the years since, I’ve used quilted forms as lines, planes, structures and even metaphors in my work. I credit the artist Eva Hesse and the architect Frank Gehry for showing me, with their own work, how to effectively move through and embrace physical space with an object.

My past professions, particularly my time as a technical writer, have influenced my artistic voice the most. As a writer, I always wondered how a person could convey complex concepts without using words. As an artist, the answer has been to create my own version of a visual dictionary. Some of the words in my Definitions series reflect my technical background, but lately I have been adding even more layers of meaning to my work, including social commentary. I plan to continue doing this even more.

My work isn’t easy to categorize, but I usually call myself a conceptual artist because the idea is the most important part. The finished works can take many forms, but I am best known for my freestanding work, so I also consider myself a sculptor. I may incorporate several different materials to get the effect that I want, but one or more quilted elements always appears in each piece. I love bold, bright colors and use them liberally to give excitement and energy to everything I make.

In the future, I hope to create several large wall-mounted installation works based on the concept of graphs and charts, as well as continuing to expand my Definitions series. I’ve only begun to scratch the surface of my ideas.

2006: Some of my best work yet

This is the last installment documenting my journey as an artist by year.

In 2006, I spent a lot of time tending to the business side of art. I created a slide portfolio for the first time and reworked the look of my website, then collaborated with graphic designers to upgrade my marketing materials, including business cards, logo, brochures and CD portfolios.

Two of my more successful works have been Discombobulated and Melted, but both were getting too old for entering shows. I would prefer not to be typecast with this "piled" style, but I created one more piece in a bright color scheme, called Tangled.

Another work from this year was Prepackaged. I had more fun with this concept than almost anything else I've ever made. The vinyl bag is removable, so you can insert another artwork inside. On the back, I have a bar code, a reorder number and it even says Made in China on the label. I wasn't able to get text on the back in the way I wanted or I would have included the following.

- Colorful fun for all ages!
- Flexible and long lasting
- Perfect for galleries and museums
- Collect the entire series!

- Easy to use. Instruction sheet included.
- Also available in 12 yd., 24 yd. and 32 yd. sizes
- Not suitable for children under 3

I almost painted a red slash through the price and put a 99 cent clearance sticker on the front somewhere, but couldn't figure out where to put the sticker so it didn't ruin the overall look.

One last work that I want to show you from 2006 is Knitted. The quilt in this piece is 1-1/4" wide by 70 yards long and the binding is all hand stitched. Here's a photo I took the first time I hung it on a wall in my studio, looking at the end of one of the knitting needles. You get a better feel for the scale of the work, which is about 8 feet tall and 5 feet wide.

Now that I've shown you representative works from each year of my art career, I plan to write at least one more entry giving you the "why" rather than the "what". Stay tuned!

2005: The year my work really "Connected"

In 2005, I expanded my visual dictionary even further, plus I combined quilted forms with other materials more than I ever had before. The resulting artwork was some of my most successful to date.

A couple of my favorites are Transformed and Triangulated, which were completed around the same time that year. In both works, the wooden supports have slots so the pieces fit together when installed, but condense down into much smaller packages for shipping and storage. They even have their own custom made storage cases, so all the pieces are protected and kept together.

I particularly like these two pieces because they both take the idea of quilts  to an extreme. The quilt is no longer just a surface to be decorated, but represents a concept within a larger design. As you can see, I was (and still am) infatuated with bright, saturated colors, so I couldn't resist throwing some in here. Lime green and hot pink never hurt anyone and they certainly get your attention!

By this time, I was thinking so much in 3D that I had difficulty switching gears, but I still managed to make two wall hangings. Connected was made for a fabric company's special exhibit and the fabric is at least 50% from their product line.  The three strips in Angled were originally meant to be the three quilts in Triangulated, but they didn't look right, so I created another artwork from them.

Can you guess how many quilts are actually in each picture? There are probably more than you think, as I often create my work in units and then attach them together. Just to give you a hint, Connected is actually made from five separate quilts.

2003 and 2004: Putting the "mixed" into my medium

In 2003, I started adding major non-quilt design elements to my work. This was a pretty radical idea for someone who had been teaching "block of the month" workshops at the local quilt shop just a few years before. My first real sculpture was Tethered, which may look like it's made of metal, but the outer covering is actually cotton batting, the stuff you find inside of a quilt that makes it warm and cuddly. Even up close, the surface appears to be metal until you touch it.

Another 2003 work was To Make a Long Story Short, created for a travelling exhibit of self portraits. It looks just like me, don't you think? The title comes from one of my father's favorite things to say, which was typically spoken just before he launched into his entire life story. Like him, I tend to be a storyteller that gets carried away, so the name seemed appropriate. The ten quilts in this piece represent different parts of my life. Left to right: computers, domestic bliss, living in New York, dating, camping. Top to bottom: art, living in Kansas, childhood, cigars and technical writing. A bit of Jill trivia: I smoked cigars back in the early 70s, long before it became the in thing for Hollywood celebrities to do.

Moving on to 2004, one of my favorite works is Extruded. Like Tethered, the "metal" part is actually made of fiber. It's supposed to look like hot metal that is being forced out through a shaped opening, cooling as it comes out, even to the point that pieces are cracking off.

I originally created Forest Floor to be a base for a creature I'd made, but they just didn't want to be together. The creature wound up being a standalone piece, called Creeped. Some people think that Forest Floor is one of the best things I've ever made, but because it's so different from my other work, I rarely show it. It looks rather fragile in the picture, but you can shake it upside down and nothing will fall off. The only part that is not attached is the spider on the web. There is a plexiglas cover which fits over the top and a custom and very well-padded storage case, which probably took as much time to construct as the artwork itself.

During these two years, I was solidifying my style, which is to use quilts as if they are raw material, rather than finished products. The more I made, the more my work became about the concepts, so the finished works took many kind of forms, including framed, wall hung, freestanding sculpture, installation art or some combination of the above.

The following year, 2005, I created some of my most interesting work, which I'll talk about in my next installment.

2002: So what do I do with these things?

In 2001, I created Discombobulated, the seminal work in my Definitions series, which led me to make a larger version in 2002 called Melted. However, this concept was something of a one-trick pony and presented some very real installation problems. I needed to do something more with the "long, skinny quilt" concept, so I created several pieces which incorporated them in different ways.

This is Emotional Entanglement. The two pieces are separate and meant to be hung so the mouths touch. When Mary McBride exhibited this at the Atlantic Center for the Arts, she said that the two heads would sway back and forth in the drafts and look like they were kissing, but sometimes the pink head would turn completely away like she was saying "Sorry, not tonight". I don't count this as part of the Definitions series because it doesn't follow the naming convention, but if I had named it Entangled, it would probably fit right in.

Another experimental work from that year was Simple Yet Elegant. I wanted to create a black and white artwork and many people who have seen this in person think it's one of my best works. However it's never been juried into an exhibit. My photographer tried his best to capture the sparkle of the rhinestones, but was not able to, meaning that the slides never did it justice. The silvery part is actually a separate quilt, created with three layers of heavy duty aluminum foil as the "batting" and silver mesh fabric as the outside layers, with black cotton fabric for the binding. The silver quilt is sewn on top of another overlay, which is made from fiberglass window screening.

I was getting closer, but still had some refinements to make to my new style. Stay tuned for 2003. Same bat time, same bat blog.

2001: the year I discovered space and became discombobulated

This is a continuation of the story of how my art got from there to here.

In 2001, just for the fun of it, I made a really long, skinny quilt that was two inches wide by 10 yards long. The colors were great, but I had no idea what to do with it. I tried weaving it back and forth on itself, but that didn't look right. For a while, I took it along when I gave school presentations to little kids in our local "artist in the classroom" program. At the end of every presentation, I'd ask "Who wants to be wrapped up in a quilt?" I'd gather everyone in the center of the classroom, pull out the quilt, hand one end to the teacher and start running circles around the group of kids, unrolling it as I went. I could usually do about 3-4 laps before I ran out of quilt.

One day, I was participating in an teacher showcase. I showed the quilt to someone and left it in a pile. Another artist cruised past my table and casually said, "I like it that way". My ears perked up and, for the first time, I started looking at the quilt as a three dimensional object instead of a two dimensional surface to be decorated. A messy pile was perfect. Soon after, a word discovered in a friend's email provided the name that I had been looking for, Discombobulated. This artwork has been displayed in some wonderful art shows around the country and is currently on exhibit at the Visions Art Quilt Gallery in San Diego as part of the Thomas Contemporary Quilt Collection until August 15, 2007.

Whenever anyone sees Discombobulated on exhibit for the first time, they always laugh. It's probably leftover laughter from all the little children it wrapped up, once upon a time.

This was the beginning of my current style of work. Because of the success with Discombobulated, I created a larger version in 2002 called Melted, which was 6 inches wide by 19 yards long. Since then, Melted has been accepted into some of the top art shows in the country.

With these few exceptions, the individual pieces didn't really resemble each other much. To provide some form of cohesiveness to the series, I adopted a naming convention, specifically one word that ends in -ed. The names I chose described the work, which meant the artwork became the visual definition for the title. This "visual definition" concept was growing inside of me more with each new piece I created.

In the next chapter, I'll talk about other early works in this series.

Artistic puberty is when your voice starts changing

I began 1999 with a commission from a very talented jewelry artist here in Wichita, Jed Closson. He'd seen my first solo show the previous October and asked me to make something for him.  I named the finished piece Collaboration3 ("cubed") because it included work from three different artists. The stitchery in the center was made by Jed's mother and he created the beautiful silver pin that's attached beneath it. There are actually two quilts here, joined along the top edge.

Around the same time, I was still reverting to some of my earlier pictorial work, with pieces like Butterfly Garden II.

Here's another work from 2000 and you can see that I was playing more with the third dimension. A number of large objects are attached, plus several smaller quilts are layered are on the surface. The name for this piece was my favorite line from when I worked as an IBM systems engineer (software expert) years ago. If someone telephoned me with a computer problem, I loved to tell them, "Sounds Like a Hardware Problem to Me".

This period, from 1999-2000, was a transitional time for me. I had no idea where I was headed with my artwork yet. I enjoyed playing with a number of interesting elements, but something still wasn't quite right. My work still had a "quilt show" air about it and I couldn't quite put my finger on the problem. In the meantime, I kept making quilts in a wide range of styles. I also took a local class in hand dyeing, which gave me more control over the look of the fabrics I was using.

At this stage, I was new and artistically gawky, so I floundered around a lot. It was really the following year, 2001, when I found my mature artistic voice.

I had a change of art

In 1998, I made a list of my best quilts, sorted by year. I was shocked to discover that I wasn't able to list a single thing from 1997. I had spent the entire year making sample projects for the beginning quilting classes I was teaching at a local quilt shop. I had always been happiest when I could push myself a little further with each project, but now I found myself sliding backwards. I did a lot of soul searching during the entire next year, because I knew that I couldn't move forward with my own work and still continue teaching traditional quilting.

Another problem was that my pictorial quilts were much more appropriate for traditional quilt shows, which are sometimes called pipe and drape shows because of the way the quilts are hung. However, I wanted to show my work primarily in art quilt shows, which are exhibited in gallery settings. I'd had tremendous success with my pictorial quilts and giving up that level of security was very difficult for me. In fact, I stewed about it for close to a year. I knew that art show jurors were looking for a lot more than my pictorial quilts were delivering, so I had to make some changes if I wanted to compete in that arena.

In 1998, I collaborated on a major project with two other quilters and won an international award for our work, called Breaking Free.  This is a picture of the front, but the back has an equally powerful design on it. In fact, the International Quilt Study Center, the current owner of the quilt, used the back to illustrate two of their biggest press releases. This quilt was one of the last pieces I made that was intended for pipe and drape shows.

A few months later, I made a conscious decision to break with the traditional quilting world and work on developing my art. I didn't make any more traditional quilts after that, I stopped going to quilt guild meetings and I stopped teaching. I was adrift on the turbulent sea of the art world and I had no idea how to paddle.

To fix that problem, I drove to Ohio in the summer of 1999 and attended a two day class taught by Caryl Bryer Fallert at the Quilt Surface Design Symposium. That class taught the business end of art, such as how to create a portfolio, record keeping and photography. It also introduced me to the world of juried shows and galleries. That class, in retrospect, was the turning point in my career. One day I was a traditional quilter and the next day I was an art quilter.

It was a whole new world.

How did I get here? And where is here?

Most people who have seen my current artwork don't realize that I started as a traditional quilter. In the early 1980s, my sister had her second child and I decided to make quilts for each of her kids. I knew how to sew, so of course I didn't think I needed to learn anything about quilting. I created a couple of simple four-patch quilt tops, each one made with two calico fabrics and constructed with one-inch seams. I put them aside for a while because I didn't know what to do next. The tops didn't look right and I hadn't heard about quilt borders yet. When her third child turned ten years old, I decided to finish the quilts. By the time I finished the first two plus the third one, a Rail Fence design, I was somehow calling myself a quilter.

This mauve ninepatch is the first quilt I made after that. It's dated March, 1993 and about 14" square. Yes, it's hand quilted and has quarter-inch seams.

A pinwheel quilt from 1994 is called Everything Old is New Again, because it was made from 1930s and 1940s fabrics. This was back in my "black border" period, when I rescued a lot of antique fabrics and thought it was cool to use them.

I finally took a few lessons at a quilt shop and a neighbor convinced me to attend the local quilt guild meetings. I was totally hooked! At one point, one of the guild members demonstrated a technique called foundation paper piecing and I began making very small quilts, while playing with fabric placement and design. My first art quilt, called First Morning at the Cabin, used this construction technique. I was still in my black border period, as you can see.

For several years, I taught traditional quilting at local shops and even taught nationally a couple of times. During this time, I started winning awards for my pictorial quilts, including an award in the Hoffman Challenge, a well known exhibit.

You can see my pictorial quilts at a hidden page on my website. Shhh! Don't tell anyone where you saw these. I don't normally show them to people anymore.

My six-week art education

By the time I was 10 years old, I knew what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wanted to be a scientist, an artist and a singer like Eydie Gorme. As it turned out, Eydie had nothing to worry about, but I've done the other two.

When I was in 8th Grade, I thought science was cool, so my parents gave me a nice coffee table book for Christmas in order to further my science education. It didn't, but reading hundreds of science fiction books did. By the time I got to high school, I thought I'd be a fashion designer instead. I had sewn my own clothes since 7th Grade and thought it sounded like a fun job.

Towards the end of my Junior year, my mother learned about a special summer program at Parsons School of Design that introduced high schoolers to different art specialties, such as painting, sculpture, commercial design and fashion design. That seemed like a good way to explore a potential career, so for six weeks I travelled to NYC on weekdays and attended the course with my friend, Toby. In the end, I learned that fashion design was a highly competitive field and you needed a lot of talent and drive to succeed, neither of which I had in any great amounts.

To prove my point, here's a picture of me from around that time, dressed in my favorite vest and skirt, both which I made myself. I'm certain that this outfit still exists somewhere, totally intact, buried deep in a landfill. The fabric was actually plastic vinyl that was printed to look like leather. Dig it up, hose it off and someone could probably wear it again.

Outside of my high school art classes, that was the first and last time I studied art. I ultimately worked in  science and technology related jobs for many years. I began quilting in 1993, which was the trigger which started my journey as an artist. I'm rather amazed that my career has come full circle and I'm finally working as an artist as I had originally planned. I may not be a fashion designer, but I am working with textiles. The whole idea of being a fiber artist did not exist back when I attended Parsons, so I'm fortunate that the art world has matured to  the point where work like mine is now included and accepted.