Art quilts solve design challenges

Design challenges met with artful solutions

by Adrienne Yorinks

Repurposing unique design feature

I first met Liz and John Couluris through another client who was familiar with my art quilts and books. She told me that her friend Liz had just bought a home in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, previously owned by record producers. The most imposing wall, 13½ feet wide by 9½ feet high, had an installation of ninety-six empty wooden frames designed to hold vinyl LP albums. These frames, immediately seen when one enters the front door, create the focal point of the entire home. They are also visible from the living room and kitchen. Liz wanted to incorporate them into something special. She had been thinking of a commission in fiber, so she phoned me.

I love working with challenging commissions, so this project was tailor-made for me. My original thought when I first saw the space was to create a monumental quilt that I could fasten with Velcro to the top and sides of the entire wall unit, hiding the frames. But Liz wanted to recycle and repurpose some of the existing designs in her home, while clearly making them her own. I realized that my initial concept did not integrate well with the existing installation.

My next thought was to create ninety-six different pieces of fiber art that could somehow sit inside each frame. Liz and I discussed her vision for the wall and her preferences for colors. Luckily for me, she was pretty open and flexible about color. I worked on a few 12½-inch blocks using photo transfers, and we talked about making a family collage the overall theme. Most of my major commissions have involved portraits of various types, and I felt comfortable with this proposal. When I adhered the blocks to the frames, however, I discovered two major problems.

The first was mechanical. The quilted fabric would not sit well inside the wooden frames because of their depth and lack of rigidity. I had to rethink the mechanics of the commission. The second problem was the photo transfers, which did not work well aesthetically in the setting. In addition, they did not read clearly as photographs from a distance.

I needed a new approach. It seemed natural to use some Florida local color, incorporating a seascape into the composition. Liz and I settled on a sunset with a moon looming over the ocean as the final design. Working this way with a fragmented image is not foreign to me. For the past twenty years, I have been working in a series titled Tartan, visually “weaving” images into large-scale tartan patterns.

I was able to take a spare wooden frame to my studio to experiment with various ideas. My breakthrough in the mechanics problem came when I figured out that the only way the piece would work was to design each 12½-inch square with the same depth, weight, and rigidity as a LP album. I tried several types of cardboard to find the ideal depth and weight, and then cut enough squares to fit each frame. In the final step, I created different pieces of textile art stitched to batting and then stitched to the cardboard. These ninety-six small quilts fit perfectly into each slot, with the final result being a spectacular moonscape.

When I do a commission, I encourage input from my clients. I want them to be thoroughly happy with the art, wanting it to have a major impact in their home. I went through different color choices for the sunset with both Liz and John until they were happy. These clients were delightful to work with, and John, being an actual rocket scientist, worked with me to

tweak the shape and surface of the moon to his specifications.

Headboard gets textile update

After I installed the moonscape, Liz showed me the guest bedroom. The previous owners had left a gigantic headboard with ten dark horizontal frames that contained a gold vinyl cushion inserted in each frame. These cushions did not match the color scheme Liz had in mind, but she liked the shape of the headboard, and again, wanted to repurpose the existing piece into something unique. For this project we looked at several of my existing pieces.

Liz liked a double-sided piece I did several years ago that had a snowball effect on a monochromatic background of dark blues. She also liked a piece titled Cherry Blossoms—flowers dancing on a silk pieced background—and a third work that I had created using raw-edged piecing in various colors, with the surface resembling chenille. I tried several versions of these very different ideas and came up with a pieced dark-blue monochromatic background with floating and playful raw-edge spherical shapes. I wanted the piece to have a whimsical aspect to counteract the austere dark rectangles. I was able to combine all three very different design ideas into a single successful concept that pleased my clients and satisfied my own design sensibilities.

Adrienne Yorinks is an artist who works in a variety of mediums. Her textile art and personal memory quilts have been exhibited throughout the world and are included in several museum collections. She also uses fabric to illustrate numerous books, most recently Hummingbirds: Facts and Folklore from the Americas. Her website is adrienneyorinks.com.