Soft Compositions
with Chris Edwards and Lauren Gregory
$175 lab fee | May 31–June 13 | Communal
This course celebrates handicraft and invites students into the sewing circle in service of solving compositional problems with the language of quilting. Serving students at all levels of experience, participants will learn traditional, nontraditional, machine, and hand-sewing techniques to produce soft objects including quilts, banners, windsocks, dolls, and installations. Demonstrations on mapping 2D and 3D images, piecing, applique, dyeing, and additive image making will encourage the exploration of the alternative and whimsical sensibilities in soft sculpture. Platforming the loose and improvisational mark-making possible with traditional stitch and applique techniques of quilt-making, this highly collaborative and social course will be inspired by the works of Rosie Lee Tompkins, the Gee's Bend Quilters, Claes Oldenberg, RuPaul, David Byrne, and Lee Bowery. Screenings may include True Stories (1986), Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt (1989), and readings may include “Knitting, Weaving, Embroidery, and Quilting as Subversive Aesthetic Strategies: On Feminist Interventions in Art, Fashion, and Philosophy” (Michna 2020). Students will conceive and construct original fiber works in response to assignments that focus on the expressive, personal, and comical possibilities of these materials. Assignments will include completing piecing, construction, binding, and quilting of a full personal quilt project, collaborating on group textiles, even with artists in other classes, and students will make a wearable item for Ox-Bow's Friday Night Costume Party. The course will culminate in a group quilt show installed in the landscape.
SAIC students: This is a 3-credit course; use the course code FIBER 627 001.
Chris Edwards (he/him) is an artist and Licensed Clinical Social Worker. In his artistic practice, he works primarily in quilting, ceramics, and puff paint. He has taught variations of the class Soft Compositions with Lauren Gregory at Ox-Bow since 2022. He has exhibited work at Western Exhibitions, Chicago; Ox-Bow House, Saugatuck, MI; Wrong Marfa, Marfa, TX; Elephant Gallery, Nashville, TN; and Adds Donna, Tusk, LVL3, Oggi Gallery, Dreamboat, and Julius Caesar, Chicago. He received his MFA in Painting and Drawing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2011 and his Master of Social Work from the University of Iowa in 2014.
Lauren Gregory (she/her) is a multidisciplinary artist and educator whose practice bridges painting, animation, and quilting, exploring storytelling and the interplay between tradition and technology. Initially trained as a portrait painter, she later taught herself stop-motion animation to bring her paintings to life. In recent years, quilting—a craft she learned as a child from the matriarchs in her family—has become central to her work, particularly as she integrates digital imagery and internet culture into this age-old form. Since receiving an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Gregory has created GIFs, looped video installations, and animated shorts that have screened at MoMA PS1 and the New Museum, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Frist Museum, Nashville, TN; and film festivals worldwide. Her directing work includes commissions for the Washington Post and music videos for Leonard Cohen, Norah Jones, James Taylor, Sarah McLachlan, and Toro y Moi. She teaches animation at Parsons School of Design in addition to quilting at Ox-Bow and is represented by Red Arrow Gallery, Nashville.