Susan Else is a California artist who makes unusual sculpture from quilted fabric. This four-day workshop covers her basic techniques for creating figures and architecture, including the use of quilted fabric collage. Students create people and buildings, eventually assembling a whole village from their individual samples. During the last class, students photograph the collective diorama and then take their individual samples home. Making a complex landscape takes weeks or months for an individual artist, but students engaged in this cooperative endeavor get a sense of the entire process, as well as learning to convey gesture and interaction between figures.

Class Days and Time:Saturdays 4/4, 4/11, 4/18, 4/25.  9am - 4pm

Supply list will be provided.

I treat cloth not as a flat surface but as a wild flexible skin for three-dimensional objects.  My work has developed in tandem with the art quilt movement, but I am one of the few artists making sculpture from this medium. I use cloth to create an alternate universe, and the resulting work is full of contradictions: it is whimsical, edgy, mundane, surreal, and engaging, all at once.  Each piece tells a story, but the narrative is always open to interpretation. The power and beauty of the patterned cloth surface play off the form and content of the work, and the result is a dynamic seesaw of meanings and possibilities.

I started this work in 1999, when I added 3D elements to a flat art quilt. I have shown nationally and internationally since then, and I teach at art centers, museums, conferences, and textile guilds across the US.