I too have a long-time admiration for Ann’s art and her teaching skills. Her new work, particularly her use of the stitched line, seems to me to take the quilting stitch to new levels. She is not only enjoying the freedom of the long arm, but she’s using it to achieve the highest kind of art stitching.

On the cross (gold) piece, for example, the spaces between the quilted lines vary from almost nothing to almost an inch. The variations mark off spaces, such as squares, within the arms of the cross. They give an already interesting piece a magical etched surface.

Stitching over stitching is another marvel of design — sometimes she stitches heavily with dark thread and then will add a line of a much lighter color over the already-stitched surface – the line may or may not match the curve or direction of the lines underneath. She is truly drawing with her needle — or rather, etching with it, combining, as etching does, the drawn line with the massing and shaping that accumulated lines make.

I was also interested to hear that she distinguishes clearly in her own mind between designing for the bed and designing for the wall. In the bed quilt that she brought for her talk, the center square (which will be on the center of the bed) was enlarged to give it the bed scale required. She thinks in design terms about the functional requirements – the hang of the bed quilt at the sides and the pillowed top, and the view, generally from the bottom up, which will be most often seen. She didn’t speak specifically to designing for the wall but as you can see from the examples in this post, her considerations and requirements are very different. It’s amusing to imagine that last, bipartite piece on a bed, even if it were large enough.

As with any fine art, Ann’s work rewards close study but also pings when first encountered. The repeated geometries of her dyed cloth, worked in a variety of ways, is a bow to quilt geometries but then gently (and sometimes not so gently) resists the tradition.

Look for more from her, too, in the future. Some family matters that she’d been responsible for have recently been lifted and she told me she’s hoping to get a lot of new work done in the next few months.