Today I headed off early in the cool of the morning on the train to visit St. Gallen, a Swiss cathedral town not far from the Bodensee (Lake Constance) and the Austrian and German borders. My destination there was the textile museum. St. Gallen is a textile town and the surrounding area has been famous for its textile mills for centuries and also specializes in lace work. When you think of Swiss handkerchiefs – especially the beautifully hand-embroidered ones – then this is the area where many of them come from. It’s a dying art though; the embroiderers are all elderly now and no-one is following in their footsteps.

The 4th European Quilt Triennial is currently  exhibited in the museum. This is an exhibit of 47 quilts – very much in the art quilt genre – which will be or have been shown in Heidelberg, Zons and Birmingham as well as St. Gallen.

There were some interesting quilts exhibited. Unfortunately I wasn’t allowed to take photos, but I’ve done my best to reproduce some of my favourite quilts from the catalogue.

Physalis by Barbara Lange from Germany

Farbenspiel (Game of Colours) by Marianne Häni, Switzerland

MG-QG104 by Michaela Grigoleit, Germany – the silks on this quilt were fabulous and made it shimmer

Unser Garten (Our Garden) by Anneliese Jaros, Austria – Anneliese comments that all the flowers depicted bloomed in her garden in 2007 and the quilt is made of loden, which is thick traditional felted wool, usually used for traditional clothing in Austria.

Were there any that really rang my bell? Mmm, I’m not sure. I’m a traditional girl at heart and sometimes I can see that art quilts are different, but would I want to give them house room? Probably not. For me a quilt just has to be a textile that you can live with. It can be beautiful but must still have something comforting and comfortable about it. There were very few where I really thought -‘wow, I’d like to try something like that’. But they were certainly interesting.

I was very conscious of how the European quilt scene (or at least what is being exhibited) has changed in the last 20 years or so. Beautiful traditional quilts exhibiting exquisite hand-work skills are nowhere to be seen. In fact they are almost looked own on as being lacking in creativity. But with the new art quilts, I find quite often the quality is missing. There were any number of quilts with dubious joins and less than great quilting and quilts that rippled against the wall instead of laying flat.

It was great to have a day out and experience a little of the current European quilting scene – but if I’m really being honest, give me a Miss Rosie quilt anyday!

Helen

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 11th, 2010 at 3:41 pm and is filed under Places, Quilting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.