Individual Art Quilts
I enjoy responding to exhibition opportunities, commissions, and inspiration from across the world with one-off pieces that enable me to explore a broader range of topics, from the venerable Orient Express to graphically notated music.
Augenmusik
12 x 27.5 inches
Since the Renaissance, “Augenmusik” (eye-music) has constituted a graphic element in musical notation that offers informed musicians additional visual pleasure beyond sound. Bach’s music is my heritage. I grew up with, and performed, it from childhood. Yet it has long transcended local borders and become part of a global musical world. The notes spelled by his name in German musical usage (“B” as B flat and “H” as B natural) are a distinct sonic marker. In the nineteenth century, an anonymous forger created this cross of staves by faking his handwriting (rather well), using musical clefs to create Bach’s name within a single note (starting on the left, reading clockwise). The quilting, with its slightly uneven spacing, echoes the hand-drawn staves of musical manuscripts.
Und wenn es Musik wäre? / And If It Were Music? (for Hermann and Monika Danuser)
39.5 x 39.5 inches
To nurture my soul, I turn to music and to textile art. This quilt interweaves these two intimate spaces in a design inspired by the musical notations both of Renaissance polyphony and of avant-garde graphic scores. The colors echo the refracted light in stained-glass windows. The musical spiral I composed is something that could be performed, bearing in mind the musical world of the Danuser family. But the design also invites contemplation in a holistic view: if my own association was with Hildegard von Bingen cosmology, my sister was reminded of Chagall’s angels.
Dune Grasses
12 x 16 x 0.75 inches
Although my work centers on the Albemarle Sound, a few pieces look to the ocean side of the Outer Banks. The grasses on the dunes are signifiers of resilience—it is a layered piece in which I did not tear the fabric with the digitally manipulated photograph.
Vienna
The Orient Express Project (SAQA Europe and Middle East)
10 x 31.5 inches
I was struck by a 1935 description of Vienna by a British traveler on the Orient Express as “not quite the end of the West, and not quite the beginning of the Near East.” His sense of a city at the interstices of East and West may have been shaped by such landmarks as the multi-colored roof of the cathedral, the Jugendstil architecture of the Secession Building, and the carnival atmosphere of the Prater. These elements informed my choice of representing Vienna through these familiar landmarks, also adding the Klimt-inspired golden “hills” with beads. But I also wanted to evoke the Orient Express railway station. Built in 1858, the Westbahnhof was destroyed by bombing in April 1945. At first, I treated it as if it were a smudged photograph, but as I realized the Westbahnhof’s role in the Holocaust, I added the angry black marks to scratch out the image.
Beach Walk, November 2020
16 x 52.5 inches
On a sunny, blustery day in late autumn, we walked along the empty beach, with the water swirling, the shell fragments sparkling, and the sand changing colors as the water receded. The wind and waves merged with the seagulls into a healing voice of nature, alleviating the loneliness brought on by the isolation of the pandemic.