Meet Ann Ribbens

MEET ANN RIBBENS

NEW SAQA MA/RI REGIONAL MEMBER

I am excited to be a new member of SAQA and I look forward to connecting with members of the MA/RI regional group. I have been living in Berlin, MA, for the last 10 months. I am a transplant from Minnesota where I lived for over 20 years. My husband and I are “trailing grandparents” in that we followed our daughter and granddaughter to MA when our daughter got a new job last year.   

I deploy a wide range of surface design techniques in my contemporary quilts.  I seek to provide rich visual details while giving the viewer a “wide angle” view.  My work is both representational and abstract.

I have always been interested in quilting.  I come from many generations of women who made fantastically beautiful quilts.  They were Midwestern farm women with great sensibilities for color and pattern.  Of course, they used scraps because that's what was available to them during the first half of the 20th century.  Little girl’s dresses and men's suits alike found new lives in these wonderful quilts.  I have 14 heirloom quilts that were made between 1880 and the 1930s, most are works of art from my grandmother and her cousin.

I have been making quilts since 1985.  It seemed like the best way to get through impossibly long Minnesota winters while raising a toddler. Though sewing skills come in handy for quilt making, so much more precision was involved to ensure that corners lined up correctly and that the color scheme worked.  Like most quilters, I had a number of ugly products, but I learned from each one.

In the mid-90s, I abandoned making traditional quilts.  I joined Minnesota Contemporary Quilters and found a whole new artistic outlet.  I’ve experimented with various media including using trims, dying my own fabrics and embellishing my work with hand embroidery and beads. 

I work in small formats, or "wall" quilts.  I have focused my work on several themes in recent years:  memory, environmental issues and women’s relationships to their bodies.

These days, I work primarily with shibori methods and deconstructed screen printing.  I’ve been successful combining the two techniques to get outcomes that I’d hoped for. My work has been exhibited at the Brush Gallery in Lowell, MA, the Schweinfurth Museum in Auburn, NY, the Minnesota State Fair and several venues in Minneapolis/St. Paul.

"21 Possible Worlds"
by Ann Ribbens