Fabric artist Jamie Eloise Bolane’s work has more in common with the multitextured pieces produced by paper and fiber artists, she acknowledges, than the products of old-school quilting bees. Yet even a light scratch of the surface reveals those very roots
Q: What does your work have in common with my great-grandmother’s piecework?
A: If you look at it from the framework of traditional quilting, it came from that tradition but evolved into an art form of its own. Art quilts often are quite abstract. They take the color or feel of something, and express it in cloth.
Q: Do many art quilters cross over from traditional quilting backgrounds?
A: Some do. Many art quilters also do something else in the art world — new mosaics, jewelry or beading, for example. For some people, art quilting provides the same community that traditional quilting did, a venue for getting together with others who like to dye and embellish fabric.
Q: Do you see similarities between people who do paper arts — making paper, bookmaking — and art quilters?
A: Art quilting crosses a lot of disciplines. The techniques of coloring cloth and paper aren’t very different at all. People rarely weave their own cloth, the way paper artists make their own paper. A fabric artist is more likely to take raw cotton and start hand-dyeing it.
Q: Or burying it in a compost pile?
A: That’s not what everyone does, but yes.
