Barbara Lydecker
Crane
Art
Quilts
18 Hill Street
Lexington,
Massachusetts 02421
ARTIST'S STATEMENT
The quilts I design and sew are intended for wall display rather than practical use, so I call them art quilts. To me the purpose of art is the communication of something important in a visually captivating way. My goal as an artist is to imbue my work with some of the beauty, mystery and magic that I see all around me in the natural world. In much of my landscape work, I imagine a moment when a particular thought or belief of mine might coincide with a particular scene: the two together, in a sort of chemical reaction, might transform for the viewer into some new element. If the image is realistically shown, I find the magic is more believable.
I love the transformative possibilities of fabric. Familiar plaid shirts become patterns of agriculture; calico cottons might be distant fields of flowers; hand-dyed and hand-painted blue fabrics become soft or stormy skies or rippling water. Lines of quilting are transformed, as well, into furrowed fields, water currents, patterns of birds' flights, or the swirl of the wind.
Making one-of-a-kind art quilts, primarily by hand-applique and hand-quilting, is meticulous and time-consuming work. But I am rewarded throughout the process by the surprises of particular fabric combinations and by the meditative peacefulness of hand sewing. In these ways the process itself extends the goal of my work to support some of my goals as a person to become more appreciative of our world, and to find a place of stillness.
