Tag: meet the artist

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Amy Pabst – Meet the Artist


Author and quilter Amy Pabst grew up in rural West Virginia, where there’s a strong heritage of quilting. Her exhibition ‘Micropiecing: Quarter Million’ presents a series of 27 miniature quilts that focuses on the traditional pineapple block on a very small scale.

Amy Pabst: https://www.instagram.com/amymakesquilt

Foundation pieced pineapple quilt by Amy Pabst - Meet the Artist
Foundation pieced pineapple quilt by Amy Pabst – Meet the Artist

All blocks are less than 2.5cm, and each piece is less than 3mm wide. Each quilt has thousands of pieces, and the series was considered complete when the total number of pieces reached 250,000. The design sources for Amy’s quilts include antique and contemporary quilts, as well as original designs. 

Variation on pineapple foundation patchwork
Variation on pineapple foundation patchwork

Amy Pabst

Amy is a West Virginia native, discovered quilting in 2011 after finding a book at her local library. Since then, she’s created countless quilts and become a prominent figure in the quilting community.  Amy is a teacher, speaker, and judge for the National Association of Certified Quilt Judges, and she actively participates in local and international guilds.  Her first book, Log Cabin: The 100,000 Pieces Project, was published in 2020 by Quiltmania.

Currently, Amy is a full-time fibers student at Marshall University, with minors in creative writing and women’s studies.

Christmas quilt by Amy Pabst
Christmas quilt by Amy Pabst

Filmed at the Festival of Quilts 2024.

For a more inspiration, please browse the ‘Meet the Artist’ collection on my YouTube Channel.

Further reading

If you’ve enjoyed watching this video, you might like the work of Lynne Edwards featured in a video from the Festival of Quilts 2023.

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Batool Showghi  – Meet the Artist

Mixed media artist Batool Showghi explores themes of cultural heritage, memory, identity, and loss. Her work is concerned with the experience of women and the way in which this experience relates to cultural and religious boundaries. Pieces reflect on the theme of turbulence, immigration, disintegration of the family and the experience of displacement.  

In response to the recent uprising of Iranian women, Batool has created a series of textile works around the theme of Struggle and Rise of Women. 

Join Batool as she shares the stories that inspired her work.

Batool Showghi: https://batoolshowghi.com/ 

Batool Showghi

Showghi uses family birth certificates, passports, old photographs and documents to create her pieces. Her work and writings in Farsi are a poetic reflection on her memories, the environment she grew up in, the family, and a city which was lost during the war. These visual autobiographical artworks are designed to narrate and show the beauty and sadness of this struggle which will always be there. 

Work by Batool Showghi
Work by Batool Showghi

Her figures come to life on canvas. The sewing machine and its needle are her drawing tools. She creates these heads, bodies, and hands intuitively, as if they look at the audience and question their plight. There is a sense of solidarity and movement between them. They know that they will succeed and overcome their struggle.  

Work by Batool
Work by Batool

Showghi was born in Iran and moved to England in 1985. She received a merit for her MA in Design & Media Arts from the University of Westminster in 1997. Batool’s mixed media work and artist’s books can be found at: The Tate Britain, British Library, The Royal Navy Museum in Portsmouth, The Museum of Art and Literature, Yerevan, Armenia, and in many public and private collections.  

Work by Batool
Work by Batool

Filmed at the Knitting & Stitching Show, London 2023.

For a more inspiration, please browse the ‘Meet the Artist’ collection on my YouTube Channel.

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The Domestic Duster Project with Vanessa Marr

The award-winning Domestic Duster Project, established by Vanessa Marr in 2014, uses the power of stitch to give women a voice in domestic contexts where they are otherwise silenced, unheard, or ignored.

The project invites women to embroider their domestic experiences, complaints, and celebrations as words or images onto a yellow duster. This exhibition showcases a selection of dusters that have been embroidered by women from across the world, challenging the legacy of so-called women’s work. 

Join Vanessa, as she shares the personal stories behind some of the dusters.

The Duster Project: https://domesticdusters.wordpress.com/about-this-project/ / https://www.instagram.com/domesticdusters/

Domestic Duster Project
Domestic Duster Project

“Each duster is unique and hand-stitched, transforming it from cleaning cloth to craftivist act. Whilst conversations often begin around cleaning, this is not the focus, rather it is a route to discussing women’s lived experiences and expectations of care, the mental load, and the sharing (or not) of home-based responsibilities. The experience of embroidering a duster for exhibition also addresses the benefits of stitching for health and wellbeing and the solidarity of group participation and common experience.  The ever-growing collection includes hundreds of dusters that have been exhibited and presented widely in community, creative and academic contexts across the UK, mainland Europe, and Florida, USA. ” – Duster project. 

Each piece tells a different story
Duster in the project

This is an on-going project.  Anyone, of any ability and from any part of the world can take part.

Filmed at the Knitting & Stitching Show, London 2023.

For a more inspiration, please browse the ‘Meet the Artist’ collection on my YouTube Channel.