My name is Charlotte, sometimes known as Ms Lottie, occasionally as The Slightly Mad Quilt Lady. This is my blog, where you'll find me writing a lot about my quilting and textile arts and a little about my family's life in a small seaside town in New Zealand. Haere mai!

Wednesday, March 4, 2015

Interview with Sue Benner, Textile Artist

Sue Benner is a Texan textile artist who attended the Manawatu Quilt Symposium as a tutor.  I attended one of Sue's classes and learnt a ton and I also had the privilege of interviewing Sue.

Photo credited to Sue Benner www.suebenner.com
My class with Sue was titled Driven to Abstraction and we completed many exercises on abstracting imagery, using different techniques and focusing on abstracting different aspects of the images.

Here is one of the photos I was working from.  It's taken near Waihi, in the North Island of New Zealand, at an old power station on a river.


Here are the small quilts I made from it.



With a close up of the one that I think is most successful.


After these small exercises I started working on a larger quilt with cormorants as the subject.  I've written and shown more of that quilt here.

Sue was generous with her time and knowledge, and I was particularly impressed with her skills as a class facilitator.  It's not always easy to get a class full of enthusiastic quilters to buckle down, stop talking and start working!

I hope you enjoy my interview with Sue.  I urge you to go and check out her website, her gallery section is truly inspiring.  And if you live anywhere near Texas, Sue has an upcoming show in April at the Texas Quilt Museum.


Posted by at
Labels: , , , , ,

3 comments:

  1. Hopes HandcraftsMarch 7, 2015 at 4:10 PM

    oh my..I am IN LOVE with that tree!! How amazing are the roots?? I enjoyed your podcast with Sue Brenner. Her work and creative story is really inspiring.

    ReplyDelete
  2. HelenMarch 8, 2015 at 12:17 PM

    Hi Charlotte

    Thanks for another great interview. I love your pieces. Your wonderful photograph is worthy of a series of quilts in its own right. Such a lot going on in it. I'd like to see you develop it into more pieces - if you can find the time :-)

    ReplyDelete
  3. RaewynMarch 11, 2015 at 7:00 AM

    I love your starting photo - those tree roots are amazing - and interesting to see the pieces stemming from it. Sounds like you really enjoyed your time at Symposium!

    ReplyDelete

Hi, I love reading comments, so thanks for visiting my blog and leaving me a message :)
Due to a huge increase in spam, I've disabled anonymous comments. Apologies if this effects any real life readers!

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)