Gabriella D'Italia

Black Finery
2008
Cotton sateen, cotton batting, machine pieced, appliqued, embroidered, hand quilted. 64 x 64 inches square.

This piece is included in Quilt National 2009 and I photographed it from the catalogue (page 54). I've returned to it many times because I have found it to be very inspiring in regard to my own work in white damask. I love the way that this artist uses a single fabric cut into tiny regular pieces which are then pieced back together again. She makes a minimalist statement about cloth itself as well as referencing larger ideas such as individualism and community. I love this idea. It reminds me to look at cloth in a fresh way. What kind of cloth is it? Is it silk, cotton, linen and what are the characteristics of those fibres? How is it woven? What is its usual purpose?
Here is her statement from the quilt national09 catalogue.

Quilts embody ideas and have functional purpose in a domestic context. Through manipulations of fabric and stitching, I explore the intimacy between manufactured objects and daily living. The idea of finery emphasizes both the created nature and elevated status of this quilt. Its homogeneous, incremental piecing refers to elemental concerns, both material and philosophical, or relationships, boundaries, and scale, all framed in the context of home.

Interested in finding more out about this artist, I googled her name and found out about her gold quilts. Here is some of what she has to say from this website.

I work compelled by a reciprocal exigency exerted in alternation between materials and mind. I find expression of the simultaneously created and creative capacities of everyday objects through incremental change and elaborate specificity so I work in tiny pieces, as in my "Finery" series, and with repetition and similarity. Upon closer examination of "Gold Quilts", seemingly identical quilts reveal vast material discrepancies. I don't want to move past objects, or transcend, but to move further into them.

There are more images of her work on the Maine Craft Guild website.
Gabriella D'Italia lives in Newburgh, Maine USA.