​Working with textiles has been part of my life for as long as I remember. I do fabric collage, fabric and paper mixed media, creative clothing, traditional quilts and this work which I call contemporary quilts.  My inspiration comes from the enjoyment I and many others have at looking at antique pieced-work quilts.  Looking at these quilts with their squares, rectangles, triangles, hexagrams, and strips and often large assortment of fabrics forces our eyes and brains to do some exciting work to enjoy the whole.  We find secondary patterns formed by the collection of patterned units; we see circles formed by a series of straight lines, and we see several layers of pattern when we focus on the quilting stitches that hold the layers together.


My contemporary quilts are made to hang on walls, and I hope they force the viewers’ eyes to make patterns and still enjoy the movement and graphic impact I try to create.  I use many traditional  patterns: the log cabin, the half-square triangle, strip piecing, and the grid of pieced squares and rectangles. My fibers are all silk of various textures and sheen.  Many are hand dyed by me because I want to create a red or green that doesn’t exist by piecing many hues of one color together. Once many years before I started my contemporary quilts I went to a fortune teller who said she had a vision of me surrounded by many, many colorful fabrics.  Neither of us knew what this could be. Thirty some years later this is me with bins of sorted colors and fabrics on every surface including the floor in my studio.

Noel Keith, opening weekend at the Gallery at Duende