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Emily Parson
Medias Used or Areas of Interest:
Fiber
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All my life I have played with fabric. I did almost every type of sewing and craft as a girl. I can remember sitting at the farmhouse table watching as my mom and grandma (grandpa helped too!) cut calico using scissors and cardboard templates. Later, after college, while working in the garment industry in NYC, my concept of quilt was expanded when I visited a quilt exhibit at the Museum of American Folk Art, and discovered Nancy Crows book Quilts and Influences. This book had a tremendous impact on me as it connected photography (another interest that was growing in me at that time) and quilt design.
I made my first quilt the following year and have been quilting in every spare moment since. My favorite part of the process is working with colorcolored pens, colored paper, colored dyes, and of course the endless colors and textures of the fabric itself. When I was in college, I opened a fortune cookie that said, Colors and textures will become important to you. If they only knew!
I am inspired by things near and dear to me: my garden, my family and pets, and my collection of oddball household objects. I believe that our outer lives reflect our inner lives. By portraying subjects of my outer life in artwork, I hope to cause myself and others to examine our inner lives
emotions and passions, beauty, hope and joy.
Emily is an award-winning quilt artist whose work has been shown across the U.S. in galleries and national juried shows, such as Edge to Edge: Selections from Studio Art Quilt Associates at the Museum of American Folk Art in New York City, Quilt National 97 and 99 at the Dairy Barn Cultural Arts Center in Athens, Ohio; and The Artist as Quiltmaker at the Firelands Association for the Visual Arts in Oberlin, Ohio.
Emily also exhibits regularly in national quilt shows and in 2001 received First Place Appliqué at the American Quilters Society show in Paducah for Poppy Field and the Masters Award for Innovative Artistry at the International Quilt Association show in Houston for her quilt, Trio.
Emilys process in making a quilt includes making a life-size drawing, collaging hundreds of pieces of fabric onto a background, stitching them down, layering this collage with batting and backing, and quilting through all the layers. One of her favorite parts of this process is dyeing her own fabrics.
Emily was born and grew up in Muncie, Indiana. She graduated with a B.S. in economics from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in 1989. She worked as a clothing designer in New York City for several years before pursuing quilt-making full-time. She lives in St. Charles, Illinois with her husband and three children.
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