festival of quilts Archives

12th November 202512th November 2025

Sara Impey – Meet the Artist

Sara Impey specialises in textile artworks inspired by traditional quilt-making techniques, incorporating free-machine stitched lettering. A former journalist, Impey writes her own material, allowing her to play with language visually and use the quilted surface to comment on contemporary issues.

Quilt by Sara Impey — Free machine stitched text

In this video Sarah shares her ‘Context’ exhibition with us.

Sara Impey: https://www.saraimpey.com

Sara Impey

A recurring theme in Sara Impey’s practice is the power of words—their ability to persuade, inspire, and sometimes mislead. In an era increasingly defined by contested narratives, her work highlights the importance of language and its impact. At the same time, she celebrates the legacy of needlework, honoring the craftsmanship and creative spirit of generations of quilters and embroiderers. Her pieces often explore the process of making itself, offering a stitcher’s-eye view into the construction of textile art.

Primarily working in wall-hung quilts, Impey occasionally ventures into three-dimensional forms, embracing new creative challenges. Her work is exhibited nationally and internationally and has received numerous accolades. Impey’s quilts are held in major public collections, including the Victoria & Albert Museum, the International Quilt Museum, and The Quilters’ Guild Collection.

She is a member of the pan-European group Quilt Art and an honorary member of The Quilters’ Guild. Her book, Text in Textile Art, was published by Batsford in 2013.

27th November 20242nd December 2024

Judith E Martin – Meet the Artist

Judith E Martin creates large, poetic, hand-stitched quilts that combine circular drawings with the tradition of North American bed quilts. In her work, she makes visible the profound feelings that rise up within her while stitching. The artist lives and works on an island in Canada and stitches with a hoop while seated near a large East facing window where her view takes in both sky and water. 

In this video Judith shares the stories behind the quilts in her solo exhibition – Softer and Dreamier.

Judith E Martin

Materials take the lead for this artist.  Many of the fabrics she chooses are old, soft, damask table linens, full of time and ritual. She also uses colourful silks and block printed cottons from India, organza or wool that she dyes herself, or references her Finnish roots with a Marimekko print. She uses both sides of her quilts, with a different title for each side.  This body of work is about the process of making it, and the stars and the clouds that she represents in the finished pieces are Judy’s attempt to share her interior world.   

In this solo exhibition, Canadian artist Judith E Martin explores the cosmic circles above us and the dream world within us.

Judith made her first quilt at the age of twenty and soon became inspired by the quilt’s connection to the important life passages that occur in bed. During the 90’s, she made hand-stitched story quilts using the poetic code she discovered in traditional quilt patterns and world embroidery. Martin holds two BA degrees in fine art, (1993 Lakehead University [Thunder Bay, On] and 2012 Middlesex University [London, UK]). Currently, her most important work is about touch and vulnerability and about the relentless passage of time.

Judith e Martin’s work has been widely exhibited across Canada as well as the USA, Europe, and Asia.

Her stitched artwork was featured in the book Slow Stitch: mindful and contemplative textile art by Claire Wellesley Smith (2015) and is supported by the Ontario Arts Council. Filmed at the Festival of Quilts 2024.

Judith E Martin: https://www.judithemartin.com

https://judys-exhibitions.blogspot.com/2024/11/arnolds-attic-features-judiths-softer.html

Slow Stitch: mindful and contemplative textile art by Claire Wellesley Smith (2015) (https://amzn.to/48VLn90)

Sidnee Snell – Meet the Artist

Textile artist Sidnee Snell is based in Portland Oregon and has been working in textiles since childhood, including a stint as a dressmaker in high school. In 1994, after a dozen or so years working as an electrical engineer and programmer, Sidnee Snell left the high-tech industry and began her professional artistic journey.

Sidnee Snell: https://www.sidneesnell.com/ \ https://www.instagram.com/sidneesnellstudio

Her early art-quilts were geometrical and abstract in design. They were heavily influenced by traditional quilts and her studies with Nancy Crow and other prominent art quilters. In 2007, she began developing a foundation appliqué technique and producing quilts based on photographic imagery.

“My quilts come together like a developing Polaroid. The construction technique I engineered uses raw-edged foundational appliqué to place the colours, quilting stitches to sketchily define the shapes, and a final washing to soften the borders between images. I like how the texture this produces blurs and abstracts my digitally manipulated photo-based images.  I want the viewer to want to touch the finished quilt, despite what all the signs in the exhibition warn. I want to entice the viewer to come closer.”

Sidnee’s work is in many public and private collections including Quilt National 2013.

“I want to know how everything is made, how everything works. Inspiration comes from anything my eye lands on, especially the push/pull of the human mark on nature and nature’s impact on the built world. I am more interested in the rusting rivet on a bridge than the river the bridge spans.”

“I was an engineer before I was an artist and now I am both. My studio practice is a union between the free-form exploration of “Why am I drawn to this image?” and “What happens if…?” and the linear thinking needed to answer the follow-up question, “How do I make this?” In my recent work, I am drawn to images that include human-made objects acted on by layers of time and natural forces. Each time a new obsession chooses me, I allow the answers to the what if question to open paths of visual- and self-exploration. I don’t want to be afraid; I want to be brave and courageous, so I work my way through my fears, trusting myself and all my years of being a maker to get me where the piece needs to go.”

Filmed at the Festival of Quilts 2024.

Tag: festival of quilts