Wild Silk 22.26

Early 20th Century Chinese Silk Embroidery ( 16'6" x 22' - 503 x 670 )

By taking ordinary pieces of cotton and transforming them into forceful collages of luminous color, contemporary textile artist Gerri Spilka brings together disparate elements of quilting, modern abstraction, and human interaction to re-imagine work of traditional sewing into a visual narrative on the collective experience. Spilka’s works bypass the purely domestic nature of typical quilting most remarkably for their color, scale, and movement. With some pieces as large as 95 inches, her works often have the presence of murals, or a modernist idea of a grand tapestry. While formally a structural component holding the layers together, the quilting stitches also establish subtle dimension and texture that can be transformed with the use of contrasting thread colors or directional shifts. Spilka hand dyes her fabrics in an antique ringer...

Heather Ujiie Call of the Wild, 2013 Digital inkjet print on cotton sateen, quilted, tactile embellishment (sequins, beads, buttons) 36 x 112 in

Rare dye-resist African cloth in wild raw silk with indigo dye having elephant border and shaped star patterns to ground, Yoruba, circa 1960.