Maria Shell

In 2001, I took my first quiltmaking class. During the stitching of that quilt, I became someone else. I have been a sewer since I was four years old, but I never saw my love of sewing as being artful. To think I could use my technical skills to create powerful visual objects was a fierce realization. For the next six years, I immersed myself in the world of quilting as best I could from the remote Alaskan town of Valdez. I studied and I stitched alone. Not until we moved to back to Anchorage, did I really begin to share and show my work.

My artwork is firmly grounded in the craft of quiltmaking. It has taken me many years to acquire the cutting, piecing, and quilting skills I now use daily.  Vintage and contemporary commercial solid fabrics, as well as hand dyed fabrics I have created, are the primary materials I use in my work. These textiles are cut primarily without rulers and stitched into a two dimensional surface. Once I create this pieced canvas, I spend hours on my long arm quilting machine stitching the top to cotton or wool batting and a fabric backing. The final step is to bind or face each individual piece.

With all my work, the driving force is always color. How to make color vibrate on the wall? That is the question for me. Most often the answer lies in proportion of line and shape in relation to color. Color is dynamic, fickle, explosive, solemn, mysterious, and beautiful. All colors possess these characteristics, and it is my daily work to explore how color is capable of being all these things for the viewer. It is with real joy that I try and try again to evoke deep emotion in the viewer through the use of color. This work is visceral. I do not know intellectually before hand what is going to happen when I put a sliver of chartreuse next to bubble gum pink, but I am always willing to take the leap, to stitch until I find out.