Chris Edwards and Lauren Gregory bring quilting and community to Ox-Bow through their third rendition of “Soft Compositions.”
There’s something age old and deeply human about a sewing circle. It’s an ancient tradition that transcends time and cultures. Lauren Gregory and Chris Edwards have participated in this tradition these past two years at Ox-Bow, each time introducing a new body of students to the practice in their course “Soft Compositions.” After an introduction of the course and a morning session to acquaint students with initial techniques, Gregory and Edwards take their seats amidst the circle. For the rest of the session, they’ll sit level with the students and join them in communing around a shared goal. By the end of their two weeks on campus, each student will complete their own quilt. Likewise, Gregory and Edwards commit themselves to finishing one alongside the students. “Far from taking away from teaching the class” Gregory finds that how “deep into our [own] creative projects [we go] seems to really fuel the situation with other students.”
Chris Edwards quilts at a table. Photo by Dominique Muñoz.
For most, this is their first quilting endeavor. Gregory explained that many of them gravitate towards precision and perfection, but Edwards loves to dispel this tendency by playfully reminding them “it’s a f***ing blanket.” At the end of the session, if it functions as such, that’s a success. This approach comes naturally to Edwards who operates on profound instinct and spends no more than two weeks on a quilt. He holds that problem solving is intrinsic to quiltmaking and loves seeing students grapple with that aspect of the form. Each one manages to develop their own ways of navigating these problems as they arise.
“The direction that people are coming from and what they want their quilt to say and what kind of things they want from a quilt and what their relationship is… it's so unique, and it's so personal, ” says Edwards. He theorizes that part of this comes from the homey and nostalgic nature of quilts. He witnesses the intersection of these personal relationships and memories with the object, intersecting with each student’s own art practice. “We see a lot of that expression of cultural relationships to quilting, how that is expressed and how the craft is expressed from [each] person.” In representational projects, Edwards finds that the process of making the quilt ends up becoming a method of processing the representation, “the process of working through something while making,” as Edwards puts it.
A student lays out quilt pieces on the studio floor. Two other students work in the background. Photo by Dominique Muñoz.
Many students come with materials of their own such as hand printed fabric and naturally dyed fibers. Some arrive with a vision in mind, while others develop improvisationally. All return home with a quilt of their own: a capsule of their method and self preserved in the fibers.
Both Gregory and Edwards model the individuality present in quilts. Gregory, a third-generation, Southern painter, made the transition to quilts during the pandemic’s early stages. During this time, she found herself unable to paint. The women in her family had modeled the tradition of quilting, just as they had painting. She recalled an early memory in which her mother made Gregory a quilt for her bed and guided young Lauren as she made a matching miniature quilt for her doll. Similarly, the first quilt Edwards made was done in collaboration with his mother during undergrad. In the course, Edwards and Gregory highlight this generational history of quilts, introducing students to its Appalachian and Southern roots with historic figures and artists such as the Gee's Bend quilters.
Quilts suspended over the meadow on a clothesline. Photo by Dominique Muñoz.
As many quilters have professed in their own words, quilts offer up their own language. For Edwards and Gregory, this language seems to be one of love. At one point during our video call, Gregory showed me the full-sized quilt Chris had given her last Christmas. “I cried like a little baby when I opened this box… it’s one of the most amazing gifts anyone's ever given me,” said Gregory. Former classmates in the School of the Art Institute’s Painting MFA, Gregory and Edwards seem to have been brought even closer through their summers teaching at Ox-Bow. “He’s my best quilting buddy,” Gregory said. “And he’s just, he's amazing… He's such a prolific quilter and it has opened up this whole world of quilting and building a quilting community that has been really special to me.”
A student feeds a quilt through the machine. Photo by Dominique Muñoz.
Each year in the studio at Ox-Bow, a micro community of quilters also emerges. Edwards credits this partially to the sewing circle: the conversations that emerge over the hours and the silences that they also share. In the studio, Edwards has observed students teaching themselves and their peers new methods. “We had students that were teaching themselves new quilting techniques… and then we all learned as they were doing them.” Edwards made it clear that this form of exchange is core to the spirit of quilt making.
Of Ox-Bow and the course, Gregory shared, “It is my favorite place, my favorite two weeks out of the year, hands down…” As she showed me shelf after shelf of fabric in her studio, she pointed to a pile set aside for Ox-Bow, “I’m already thinking of what fabrics I’m going to bring next summer.”
Interested in taking the course? Soft Compositions returns to Ox-Bow this summer. Registration opens March 31, 2025 at 10:00 a.m. ET.
This article was written by Shanley Poole, Engagement Liaison & Storyteller, based on interviews conducted with Chris Edwards and Lauren Gregory in 2024. The article was originally published in our 2024 Summer Course Catalog.
All photos by Dominique Muñoz (Summer Fellow 2024). Banner image features a student piecing together a quilt on a table.