Nicole Riedmueller

Within my art practice, I utilize craft and textile materials for their rich communicative and sensorial implications. My current work explores quilting and its capacity to reveal the unheard voices and untold stories of women. I use slip cast clay and glaze to act as a stand in for traditional fabrics and stitching. This work is quiet and repetitive. Within the repetition of form and surface, there is made visible a steady rhythm. A larger pattern emerges comparable to my ongoing personal performance of familial love and nurturing. In working with the idea of quilts, I have embraced the concept of productive re-interpretation which scholar and artist Kristy Robertson describes as the act of revisiting the history of quilting through a progressive, feminist lens. I contend that using clay and glaze as unconventional quilting materials maintains the politically subversive potential that has been acknowledged in history of quilting. This work holds space and makes visible the point of view of those whose labour and effort takes place within private and domestic work sites.