Bloom

When I first created Noisy Flowers, I knew I was onto something. I kept trying the motif in new color combos and each time I finished another one, this confirmed that I wasn’t only a quiltmaker - I was getting back to my artist and textile designer roots. These felt like art.

Over time, I got better at knowing how to make the fabrics do what I wanted them to do (FYI - fabrics don’t like being asked to make these curves and then lie flat). I called an art friend of mine with some questions about how she mounted her work and she offered me the use of her studio while she was gone for a month. I made 11 new Noisy Flowers in that month. It was time to get a studio for myself.

My first studio was small and it was a shared space with 3 painters that I was allowed to work in 3 days a week - but it was amazing! I wanted to work large scale, but didn’t have a lot of space, so i decided that I could work on a body of small pieces that would create an overall feeling of a big piece of work. The initial goal was to make 50 Noisy Flowers.

Each time I made one, I swapped out a few of the fabrics on the cutting table for some new ones and I began a color journey - I was thinking about the thousands of shades of green that I saw on that first trip to Costa Rica, and living in urban and dry Los Angeles, we don’t get color like that - so I began to see if I could find a way to capture that overwhelming sense of green that I felt when I was in Central America.

A friend in a crit group asked me once, “Why are these always square, Liberty?” and I had no answer for her, so I began to play with the shapes and edges too. Eventually I did have a large collection of finished pieces and a friend and I set up a two woman show that we named BLOOM where I finally got to see what all my pieces looked like filling a room.

That show was so great. Many of the pieces have sold and the collection won’t ever be the same again, but one of the fun things about this particular body of work is that it is different every time. I love it when buyers and curators come and look at the collection and decide on how they will put the different pieces together in galleries or homes.