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.