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.
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"21 Possible Worlds"
by Ann Ribbens |
