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Thursday, June 30, 2011

Zanesville Superlatives 2

I wrote yesterday about some of the work now on display at the Zanesville Museum of Art in the show Superlatives: Comtemporary Ohio Quilts.  Today I'll talk about two other artists in the show.

Sandra Palmer Ciolino was represented one-and-a-half times, you might say.  In addition to her own six quilts, she was the machine quilter for one of Nancy Crow's screenprinted pieces on display.  Her work is gorgeous, as you can see in the detail shot below, which shows about a 4" width.  She explains that this photo was taken before she went over the entire quilt with tweezers to remove the cat hairs.  
  
Nancy Crow, Structure #6, machine-quilted by Sandra Palmer Ciolino (detail)

My favorite of her work in the show was this quilt, which I had the pleasure of seeing, partially finished, on Sandy's design wall earlier this year.  She's a piecer from the classic school, her intricate designs complemented by equally intricate machine quilting.  (Sandy will be teaching machine quilting at the Crow Barn this fall.)

Sandra Palmer Ciolino, Martello 2, 2011



















I mentioned yesterday that the big draw in this show was Nancy Crow, much more famous than anybody else in the exhibit.  But the best piece in the show, in my opinion, was made by Sue Cavanaugh, whose shibori-dyed pieces have been winning prizes and admiration for several years.  This year, Sue won the Lynn Goodwin Borgman Award for Surface Design at Quilt National for the second time in a row, for a piece very similar to those she had on display in Zanesville.

Sue hand stitches tight pleats into her whole-cloth backgrounds, then paints dye over the top.  When she releases the stitched resists, sometimes she leaves the threads in the fabric as a counterpoint to the later layer of hand quilting.  In past years her work had quite a bit of color, as shown in the piece below.

Sue Cavanaugh, Ori-Kume #4, 2008

But recently she's been using a lighter hand with the dye-paint, yielding pale expanses with the most subtle patterning.  Her Quilt National piece this year was on the small side, 41 x 52", but the piece in Zanesville was huge, 94 x 164", commanding the room and astonishing the viewer.  Wow!!

Sue Cavanaugh, Ori-Kume #22, 2010

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