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Soft Compositions


Soft Compositions

with Chris Edwards & Heather Mawson
FIBER 627 001 | 3 credits | $175 lab fee
August 10–23, 2025

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.

Chis Edwards, Red Room With Quilted Wall Hanging Quilt, 2024, cotton fabric, 72 x 90 in.

Chris Edwards (he/him) makes work that focuses on practicing caring about things and being at home. He makes quilts and pottery in the pursuit of making art that depicts objects found in his space alongside pretend elements. 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 Ox-Bow House, Wrong Marfa, Elephant Gallery, Adds Donna, Tusk, LVL3, Oggi Gallery, Dreamboat, Western Exhibitions, and Julius Caesar in Chicago.

Heather Mawson, Environment, 2024, laminated newspaper, thread, 42 x 41.5 x .25 in.

Heather Mawson (she/her) is an interdisciplinary artist and educator that views process, layering, collage and archiving as the foundation of her practice. She uses time-based media and everyday materials to investigate how U.S. economic and political systems shape personhood. Her current research looks at the history, techniques and semiotics of quilting within the United States to reexamine within her work the materials and images that are saturated in our day-to-day lives. Through the process of collecting, transforming and organizing images and found materials, she questions where the system ends, and the individual begins. Mawson received her BFA in Fine Arts from The University of Texas at El Paso and an MFA in Sculpture from Cranbrook Academy of Art. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally with a focus on artist-run spaces. Mawson lives in Detroit and teaches at Wayne State University.

Earlier Event: August 10
DRAW, PAINT, PRINT
Later Event: August 24
Bookbinding with Decorative Paper