Splendiferous Fibers
These are not your grandma’s quilts
When Alexandria artist Wendy Starn sets out to make a quilt, she rarely uses a pattern. In a recent work, for example, she silkscreen-printed trees onto a background, below a painted moon. The borders were made of hand-dyed fabrics, quilted with the shapes of leaves of native swamp red maple, honey locust, and sassafras. “So, it’s very specific to the region,” she said.
Often, when she’s working with nature scenes, she works from a photograph—expanding it to the size of a quilt. “Then I’ll take sections of it and put them on different pages, print out the whole thing—which could be like twenty pages, all taped together.”
Other times, it’s pure improvisation—usually driven by Starn’s fascination with color. “I’ll just kind of make different shapes, figuring out how to kind of jigsaw them together. The seams will be wonky, nothing is straight. No little corners match or anything like that. But it gives a lot of energy, the way the colors are all bouncing off each other.”
Starn has been sewing since grade school, when she earned her sewing and dressmaking badges in Girl Scouts, and she’s been creating art just as long. “Eventually, the two just kind of joined,” she said. She made her first quilt in 1987 for a baby on the way, and spent her own early years of motherhood creating original garments for her children. “My daughter was always the best dressed kid in kindergarten,” she laughed.
“I’ll just kind of make different shapes, figuring out how to kind of jigsaw them together. The seams will be wonky, nothing is straight. No little corners match or anything like that. But it gives a lot of energy, the way the colors are all bouncing off each other.” —Wendy Starn
She began to pursue quilting as an artform in its own right around 1996, and since then has made a name for herself across the country’s textile arts scene, especially here in the South. Last year alone her work was exhibited at local venues including the Bluebonnet Swamp Nature Center in Baton Rouge, several South Louisiana library branches, the Alexandria Museum of Art, and the Hammond Regional Arts Center. She was also featured at major quilting festivals and competitions including the world’s largest modern quilting event, Quiltcon and the International Houston Quilt Festival—where her work “Party at the Cabin” was selected for a Judge’s Choice Award. Closer to home, her quilt “Papaver” received a merit award at the Tom Peyton Memorial Arts Festival in Alexandria. “Last year was my year,” she said.
In addition to her more abstract, color-focused quilts and her nature studies, Starn is also well-known for her political quilts. Last year she was recognized in the annual FL3TCH3R exhibition at East Tennessee State University’s Reece Museum—which celebrates the spirit of social and political commentary through the art of quilting. Starn’s work “Sugar and Spice and Fundamental Rights”—which at first glance appears to be a traditional, pink bed quilt, but upon closer examination centers a provocative, hidden message—received the “Protection of Human Rights: Women’s Rights” Award. “In these pieces,” she explained, “is where I put my voice on matters I care about.”
In April, Starn will head to Slidell for the Gulf States Quilting Association Biennial Quilt Show—which she has participated in, off and on, for twenty years now. Celebrating quiltmakers creating what organizers describe as “not your grandmother’s quilts” organized under this year’s theme “Gulf States Beauty”—the exhibition will feature several of Starn’s works, spanning various techniques and artistic approaches.
[Read about the "Mississippi Gulf Coast Yarn Bomber," Knotty Harts, here.]
“Cypress Sunset” is an idyllic depiction of a South Louisiana landscape, mostly painted on fabric, with cheesecloth arranged and sewed on top to represent the trees.
“Elegy” is a more abstract work that uses a traditional pattern, drawn from a quilt top attributed to Martha Washington from the Mount Vernon collection. By changing the colors so that the quilt is mostly white with stark black, unquilted blocks—“I was going for something that felt like a modern quilt, but [because of] the time period when I made it [during the pandemic], it ended up being more of a mourning quilt.”
“Jenny Anydots” represents Starn’s more playful style, emerging from a fabric challenge put on by a Ruston quilt and fabric shop in 2022 to depict—in a maximalist flurry of color and pattern—Starn’s cat.
And finally, there is “Throw Me Something, Martha,” a good old-fashioned tribute to Mardi Gras in intricate patterns of purple and gold and green, with Martha Washington at the center, wearing a mask and sipping on a hurricane. The quilt, adorned with real beads and doubloons, is one of Starn’s heaviest, she said. “This is obviously what Martha Washington would have done if she could have come to Mardi Gras,” she laughed. “It’s got very traditional elements to it, but it’s not very traditional. I figured it might speak to the folks at this show, celebrating the Gulf South.”
See Starn’s work, along with over three hundred other quilts from regional artists, at the Gulf States Quilting Association Biennial Quilt Show on April 12–13 at the Harbor Center in Slidell. Details at gulfstatesquilting.org. See more of Starn’s work on her Instagram and Facebook accounts under the name “Splendiferous Fiber”.