The Quilts of Gee's Bend, at the Royal Academy of Arts.

The Quilts of Gee's Bend, at the Royal Academy of Arts. 

(Part of  Souls Grow Deep like the Rivers, exhibition)

The quilts of Gee's Bend are quilts created by a group of women and their ancestors who live or have lived in the isolated African-American hamlet of Gee's Bend, Alabama, along the Alabama River. The quilts of Gee's Bend are among the most important African-American visual and cultural contributions of the history of art within the USA. 

Many of the residents in the community can trace their ancestry back to enslaved people from the Pettway Plantation. Arlonzia Pettway can recall her grandmother's stories of her ancestors, specifically of Dinah Miller, who was brought to the US by slave ship on 1859. The area is named after Joseph Gee, a landowner who came from North Carolina and established a cotton plantation in 1816 with his seventeen slaves.

After the American Civil War many of the formerly enslaved people remained on the plantation working as shareroppers, who were obliged to give part of their crop to the ladowner, and many inhabitants today will bear the surnames of their ancestors' enslavers. The community was able to remain intact due to government loans provided during the Depression which enabled tenants to buy the land they farmed and protected them from forced evictions.

This continuity allowed a unique tradition of quiltmaking to survive and be passed down through generations of women. Most of Gee's Bend quilts are improvisational or 'my way' quilts. Quiltmakers start with basic forms then head off  'their way' with unexpected patterns, unusual colours and surprising rhythms.

When the quilts toured US museums in 2022, their luscious hues, scissored shapes and improvised visual rhythms garnered comparisons to Paul Klee and Henri Matisse. 

 

Rachel Carey George

Martha Jane Pettway, 'Housetop' - nine-block 'Half-Log Cabin' variation, 1945, (corduroy)

Flora Moore, 'Log Cabin', variation, 1975, (corduroy)

Dorothea Pettway, 1960

Marlene Bennett Jones, Triangles, 2021 (denim, corduroy and cotton)

Loretta Pettway Bennett, Medallion, 2005, (cotton and twill)

Essie Bendolph Pettway, Side Seams, 2018, (camouflage, denim and cotton)

 

Through our hands

 

Through Our Hands, at Leamington Spa Art Gallery and Museum.

The intention of this exhibition is to move beyond utility and practicality and to champion the modern, artistic side of quilt making; to show what a thriving, if little known, art form it is and to increase the awareness of art quilts and their concerns.

The definition of art quilts and the relationship between art and craft is controversial and has often been the subject of lively debate.

Laura Kemshall, Bird in the Hand  (UK)

By using digital collage and digital print Kemshall was able to work on fabric in much the same way as on paper, combining photographs with graphite drawings. These are printed onto cotton fabrics and machine quilted.

Linda Kemshall, Imagining (UK)

This was digitally printed using drawings from Kemshall's sketchbooks in combination with photographs which she took of her moth collection. The machine quilting is free motion.

Sandra Meech, Silent Voice II (UK)

This is part of a series of works based on endangered woodlands. Meech has used ghostly images with minimal colour to illustrate this, with the red/rust representing dying forests in western Canada affected by the pine beetle - a result of warm winters. Photo imagery, paintings and writings are transferred onto cloth which is pieced and machine quilted.

Dijanne Cevaal, Traveller's Blanket with Circles, (Australia)

Annabel Rainbow, Life 2, Be the Change you Want,  (UK)


'I find people endlessly interesting, and I've chosen to explore this interest through a series of quilts called Life Stories'.

Annabel Rainbow, Life 3 Switching off 

'Our clothes give the world one image of what we are like, by stripping them away, I hope to portray who we really are.'

Annabel Rainbow, Life 4, Hello Dear, What did you do Today?  (UK)

'In this quilt I'm trying to capture what it is to be a woman today; how we balance our expectations that others have for us: motherhood, caring for our families, domesticity, as well as a career and academic success.

Even though the image on the quilt is designed to stand alone, painting and fabric can only go so far. By stitching text onto the body, I add another layer of meaning, developing an intellectual response to enhance the visual emotional one and fulfilling the technical need to stitch the three layers of the quilt together. The words on this quilt are a blistering response to its title.'

Eszter Bornemisza, City in the Aire  (Hungary)

'In my practice I try to work the unique characteristics of textile while striving to find ways to make my own statements. My starting points are ideas that reflect our relationships with traces and settlements of past cultures: the layers of existence. In recent years my interest turned towards large scale transparent textiles while keeping my sources of inspiration in patterns of urban living. Lately I have tried to expand the multi-layered networks of the cities into the form of three dimensional objects and installations'.