Things are happening in my fiber arts world. I am happy to say I have some work that was juried into the Columbia Fiber Arts Guild, Singer Hill Gallery, Infinity Art Gallery, and Pacific West Quilt Show.

The show at the Gallery at Singer Hill Cafe excepted my fiber art work. The art works that were accepted are “Broken Heart” and “Fairy Candles.” They will be shown during the month of May.  Gallery hours are Tues. – Sat. 9:30 am to 2 pm, Late Afternoons & Evenings by Appointment.

The Singer Hill Cafe is an experience in itself. There are beautiful “vertical gardens” inside and out, designed and lovingly tended by the owner. These involve sheets of absorbent material covering the wall surface, with pockets cut to contain the plant material. Quite beautiful!

My work is also being shown on-line at the Infinity Art Gallery  “Paradigm Shift” and “Portland Spirit” are there for viewing. I hope to have this work juried into Infinity’s grand show on June 15.

The Pacific West Quilt Show, to be held August 24-25, 2012, at the Greater Tacoma Convention & Trade Center, Tacoma, WA, has just accepted two of my pieces. “Portland Spirit,” and “Hope in the Desert” will be on display between August 24 and 26.

Take a look and enjoy the links.

I am working on a Fiber Art challenge that was given to a critique group in which I participate. It was presented by Pine Needle, a local quilt shop where we meet. The challenge involves using only black and white fabric with one other color, and specific dimensions of 16″ x 24″.

Here are two photos of my work in progress. My first effort didn’t work, so I changed the location of the flowers. The second photo shows where I moved the flowers and added a red line of yarn.

Hope On The Desert 35.25” x 38” is now a completed art quilt inspired from a trip to Tucson. A Little splashes of green on a landscape dominated by shades of brown go a long way. Water has become a more worrisome topic recently, with disastrous quantities in some places, and drastic shortages in others. One hopes that balance returns.
The quilt is pieced, appliquéd and machine quilted. I applied paint and used over dyed fabric as well.

A rewarding experience at SAQA (Studio Art Quilt Association) and SDA (Surface Design Association) Conference in Philadelphia.

Identity: Context and Reflection was a joint conference of Studio Art Quilt Association and Surface
design Association. This conference had a profound influence on me. It inspired me, and influenced my thinking about fiber and quilt art. There were several lecture by museum curators and collectors.

My favorite was a talk by the three jurors, Elizabeth Barton, David Revere McFadden and Sandra Sider, of Art Quilt Elements 2012. They explained how they juried the show, and how they came to their final selections. They stressed how very important it was to have good photos when entering work in juried shows. Also, discussed importance of having good contrast, movement and texture in your work, which must show in the photos.

After the lecture, we moved on to the show, which was a great deal more interesting after hearing how and why the jurors selected the work, and finally picked the winners. We could then better understand how difficult it is to jury a show. Art Quilt Elements 2012 will be on display until May 13 at the Wayne Art Center (http://www.wayneart.org/).

Bruce Pepich, Executive Director and Curator of Collections, Racine Art Museum was the keynote speaker. He spoke on art work as a form of communication, and how the art quilt and fiber art is being accepted in major museums, a trend that is taking place today in the US and around the world.

The closing speaker was Bruce Hoffman, an independent curator and writer. His topic was, “Identity: Context and Reflection,” focusing on a presentation called, “A Sense of Place,” shown at the Philadelphia Art Alliance. He told us the history of Fiber Philadelphia, and how it has grown in the past ten years.

We spent one day going around Philadelphia seeing, seeing as many of the exhibitions as we could cram in in one day. And naturally, took in a few of the many historic venues that the city has to offer.

The conference was a great success, and we learned a great deal. I look forward to the conference next year in Santa Fe. If you would like to have a more in depth look at the conference, visit the SAQA site.

I would like to share some of the great fiber art and quilt art pieces I saw while visiting Fiber Philadelphia a few weeks ago. Here are some of my favorite artists and shows.

Art Quilt Elements is one of the shows that I liked best. The book,Art Quilt Elements, is very well done and offers interesting comments on each piece of work. Some of my favorites are listed below:

Barbara Schneider, Woodstock, IL. Her beautiful work entitled, Leaf Fall, Fragments is available for viewing on her web site.

Christine Hager-Braum, Durham, North Carolina.  More Than Just The Sun: Northern Red Oak a very Interesting use of fabric.

Dianne Firth, Canberra, Australia. Red Stones #2 was my very favorite. Unfortunately, there are no photos of this piece that show how it looks as the lighting changes to shadows.

Kristin La Flamme, Waipahu, Hawaii.  The War Sucks piece just made me think, and I really liked the freedom in her use of fabrics and paint.

Other artists and shows which I think are worth talking a look at are:

Amy Orr  She works with plastic cards – credit, hotel, gift, etc. – and builds wonderful mosaic-like compositions. Much of her work is beaded into cloth, with broken slivers of identity permeating the surface. You can donate cards, and she will put them to good use.

Jason Pollen, whose work 48 Prophets comprised individual pieces, mounted together to form one image. The pieces were made of linen and silk on canvas, thread, pigment and graphite. Each 10.5″ square portrait of a person, was sold separately.

At Mending=Art take a look and see how the humble art of mending is used by these artists as an art form.

Pae White   A fascinating installation!

Mark Bradford and Jennifer Setinkamp at the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia.

 A Quilter Speaks in Textile Language is a show at OSU Center for the Humanities, Autzen House, Corvallis, Oregon. Sidney Snell is the featured artist this quarter at OSU’s Center for the Humanities. Sidnee does some very unusual art quilt work and I look forward to viewing this art.

I thought I would share something a little personal and a rewarding experience. The making of this art quilt was interesting and somehow freed me up. It also made me forget about what was going on in my body and get on with life.

The idea for this quilt came to me as I was recovering from a pacemaker implant. Looking at the printout featuring the patterns of my arrhythmic heartbeat, I decided the stuttering lines would translate well into cloth and thread.

The roses are get-well present to my recovering heart. The cheesecloth, wax paper, some paint appliqué and paper give the piece a greeting card quality.

Broken Heart

The Susan G. Komen, Race for the Cure in Portland art quilt is now complete. I am pleased with the outcome and hope you enjoy it also.

I thought it was time to share what I was doing. This cactus art quilt is just in the beginning of it’s journey to being completed. I plan to resize and move the cactus plants around to make it a better composition. This has been a slow process since the pictures I took in the high desert. I am still considering adding some other elements such as line drawing of baskets. This is something I have done on the other recent quilts such as Portland Through Runners’ Eyes.

I have just added some new art placemats to the gallery so take a look. Below is just one of the exciting examples.

The 100th Monkey Studio in Portland Oregon is proud to host two connecting exhibits: The Oregon Women’s Caucus for Art (Evolve Gallery) and one OWCA member’s retrospective, Suzan Mayer (Lounge Gallery).  The opening event is First Friday January 6th from 6-9pm with live music by Amber Harlan. The show runs from January 6 through January 27th, 2012. There will be live music by Amber Harlan.  The event is free and open to the public.

As a member of OWCA I am happy to be a part in this event. Please join us for the opening. Visit The 100th Monkey Studio to see more about the event.

One of my pieces has been juried into SAQA Oregon’s show, Oregon: State of Diversity II. I am very pleased and excited to be part of this event. The show will travel throughout the state during 2012 and 2013. SAQA Oregon has had a wonderful response to the first exhibit, and they expect that will translate to more viewers and more venues for the current collection. I look forward to seeing the show, and will post locations and presentation dates as the information becomes available.  The exhibit will debut at “Stitches in Bloom” in Silverton at the Oregon Garden in January 2012, and will travel through 2013.

After taking part in the Susan G. Komen, Race for the Cure in Portland this past summer, I decided to make another art quilt featuring runners. So far, I have the back completed. I collected number placards from several participants (some pink, to recognize “survivors,” with those in white ones for “supporters”). I also included my own. The top for the quilt featuring runners is now in progress.

The Fairy Candle art quilt was inspired by a class I attended with Jane Sassaman on Abstracting from Nature. It has been an interesting project, and I look forward to doing more with this process. The design comes from a picture of a skunk cabbage that I took some time ago. I really like the process, and am quite pleased with the results.

My Night Riders art quilt is  experimental, using black batting for the background. The texture gives it an interesting look.

Now that summer is over and things have started to slow down, I have been able to focus on some “work-in-progress” that have been in progress for too long.  I am still working with bikers and runners, and look forward to doing more on theme.

My Portland art quilt now has a name:  Portland Through Runners’ Eyes. Included in this blog is a peek at the back of the quilt, as many have asked what I did with the reverse side. I gathered number placards from runners, received when they participated in a run or race. I had many saved from my running days in Japan, but as this art quilt was an Oregon original, I wanted to remain that way. Working on this piece has inspired me to experiment more with such placards, from both biking and running. More to come in the future!

This summer has been very busy and my work has slowed to a crawl. But I did finish the “runners” art quilt. I would really like to explore the runner theme more, along with that of the bikers. As to the quilt, the runners are silhouettes and the background is painted and stamped. I took pictures of some of Portland’s unique bridges, and then used Photoshop to modify them. They were then transferred to the fabric. The process really intrigues me.

For the back of the quilt, I used the number placards runners receive when they enter an event. I am now saving more of these (and scrounging some from runners!) as I love the way they work on the back. To protect the paper numbers, and to make them easier to attach, I used gel medium. I am still working on a name for this piece of art.

I look forward to the end of summer so I can get back to work, and develop more projects around this idea and method.

Announcing a big event at the Singer Hill Cafe in Oregon City!  A new High Fiber Diet Show entitled, “NW Vibes” will be opening at the cafe beginning August 2nd.

An Artist Reception will be held from 5-8 PM on Aug. 5th, with live music provided by “The Sale,” beginning at 6PM.

The NW Vibes show presents  21 new art quilts and examples of wearable art, including a piece by Bonnie Bucknam, best-of-show winner of the 2011 Quilt National Exhibition.

Singer Hill Café’s “Fundraiser Friday” will donate 25% of profits made from food and beverage purchases to HIgh Fiber Diet.

Singer Hill’s art gallery will be open for viewing during normal business hours (Sunday 8:AM to 5:PM, Monday, 7:AM to 6:PM, and Tuesday through Saturday, 7:AM to 8:PM)

For information on gallery sales, contact Karen Grondin at (917) 207-2354.

High Fiber Diet is a fiber-art group affiliated with the Columbia FiberArts Guild of Portland. Its members include fiber artists and surface design teachers, authors and professional art quilters.. The High Fiber Diet blog is available at http://hfd-highfiberdiet.blogspot.com. There you will find a list of the most recent shows and a membership roster with links to individual websites and blogs.

I am excited to say I was juried into the Women’s Caucus for Art/San Diego on line show. It is a nice exhibit so take a look and you will find two of my art quilts. They are Flauna and Paper Plastic, Think About it.