Laura Wasilowski
About Laura
Laura Wasilowski is a textile artist creating free-form hand embroideries and improvised art quilts. Working with her hand-dyed fabrics and threads, her artwork is narrative in nature and whimsical in style expressing her joy and love of making art.
Laura’s art is collected and exhibited internationally and has appeared in multiple publications since her career began in 1992. She is also the author of 5 books on creating textile art and an online instructor with Creative Spark.
Living in Elgin, Illinois, she tends her garden, cares for her family, and creates small ceramic sculptures when not stitching her colorful fabrics.
Artist Statement
I combine vivid colors and whimsical stories to create free-form hand embroideries and improvised art quilts. Each stitch with needle and thread slowly creates a story that amuses me and fills me with joy. As I improvise a design or gently pull thread through fabric, worlds evolve and narratives take shape stitch by stitch.
Process
If you catch me staring into space for minutes at a time please note that this is the first step in the design process. Visualizing the artwork helps me shift around design elements while pondering their placement and scale. I audition colors, contemplate fabric choices, and plot the order of construction. Maybe a sketch is doodled to plan something large. But most often the art is designed and held in my imagination.
The next step is very much a hands-on process. Keeping that imagined design in mind, I spend hours sorting through colorful fabric scraps for the elements. My stash of hand-dyed silk and cotton fabrics or purchased wool and felt fabric scraps are often the debris from other artwork. These odd fabric shapes trigger even more design ideas and spin the original idea in other directions. It’s as if the fabric takes over and tells me if it is the right color, shape, or texture.
Construction of the design consists of auditioning, trimming, and assembling fabric shapes. Silk and cotton fabrics have fusible web on the back so I can iron them into place. Wool and felt fabrics are placed on top of background fabrics and stitch-tacked into place. Eventually, I release the grip of my imagined design and let the tangible design evolve and change to a concrete form of color, texture, fabric shapes, and stitched thread.
And as I work I remind myself to be brave. Slice that fabric, change that color, toss that collage, and sadly, remove that stitching that took hours. Nothing is precious. My art does not replicate nature or reality. I make stylized designs with a hint of whimsy. I am an improviser. Give me a set of rules and I will ignore them.
