Soft Compositions

with Chris Edwards & Lauren Gregory
FIBER 627 001 | 3 credits | $50 Lab Fee
June 23 - July 6, 2024

This course celebrates handicraft and invites students into the sewing circle in service of solving compositional problems with the language of quilting. Serving students at all levels of experience, participants will learn traditional, nontraditional, machine, and hand-sewing techniques to produce soft objects including quilts, banners, windsocks, dolls, and installations. Demonstrations on mapping 2D and 3D images, piecing, applique, dyeing, and additive image making will encourage the exploration of the alternative and whimsical sensibilities in soft sculpture. Platforming the loose and improvisational mark-making possible with traditional stitch and applique techniques of quilt-making, this highly collaborative and social course will be inspired by the works of Rosie Lee Tompkins, the Gees Bend Quilters, Claes Oldenberg, RuPaul, David Byrne, and Lee Bowery. Screenings may include True Stories (1986), Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt (1989), and readings may include “Knitting, Weaving, Embroidery, and Quilting as Subversive Aesthetic Strategies: On Feminist Interventions in Art, Fashion, and Philosophy” (Michna 2020). Students will conceive and construct original fiber works in response to assignments that focus on the expressive, personal, and comical possibilities of these materials. Assignments will include completing piecing, construction, binding, and quilting of a full personal quilt project, collaborating on group textiles, even with artists in other classes, and students will make a wearable item for Ox-Bow's Friday Night Costume Party. The course will culminate in a group quilt show installed in the landscape.

Chris Edwards makes work that focuses on practicing caring about things and being at home. He currently makes quilts and pottery in the pursuit of making art that depicts objects found in his space alongside imagined elements that add layers of humor, glamor, and mysteriousness. His work reflects his interest in creating objects that become part of his environment and interact with the real objects and life they represent. He received his Master of Fine Arts in Painting and Drawing from SAIC in 2011 and his Master of Social Work from the University of Iowa in 2014. He is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker and works as a psychotherapist in addition to his art practice. He lives in Chicago with his husband, dog, and two cats. He has exhibited work at Adds Donna, Tusk, LVL3, Oggi Gallery, Dreamboat, Western Exhibitions, and Julius Caesar in Chicago.

Chris Edwards, Yellow Vanity with Pink Hallway Quilt, 2023, quilt fabric, vinyl, fringe, pompom trim, 72 x 90' in.

Lauren Gregory (she/her) is a painter, animator, director and quilter who is best known for her technique of oil paint stop-motion animation, a way of making her paintings move. Born and raised in the mountains of East Tennessee, she began as an observational portrait painter, capturing friends and family in quick one session sittings. Lauren is the third in a lineage of southern female painters, following in the footsteps of her mother and grandmother. She received an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2009, and since then has created GIFs, looped video installations, and narrative animated shorts that have screened at MoMA P.S.1, the New Museum, MOCA Los Angeles, and at museums and film festivals around the world. She has directed and animated music videos for Toro y Moi, Leonard Cohen, and Uffie, and has been awarded artist residencies in Italy, Hungary and in upstate New York. Quilting, another art form she learned as a child from the matriarchs in her family, has resurfaced as a major part of Lauren’s practice in recent years. She teaches Experimental Animation at Parsons School of Design and teaches quilting at Ox-bow School of Art. She is represented in New York by the Elijah Wheat Showroom, and in Nashville by Red Arrow Gallery. Lauren lives and works in Nashville, Tennessee.

Lauren Gregory, The State of Tennessee Quilt, 2023, cotton and thread, 86 x 61.5 in.