By Her Hand: Contemporary Quilts Inspired by the Nova Scotia Museum’s quilt collection

New works by two contemporary Nova Scotian designers and quiltmakers, Andrea Tsang Jackson and Marilyn Smulders, have been created in response to very special examples of historic quilts chosen in collaboration with Lisa Bower, Assistant Curator at the Nova Scotia Museum. The installation will include various quilted objects such as bed quilts and quilted garments.

For many women in times past, quilting offered an outlet for expressing voice and agency and represented a way to leave a mark by her own hand. For the maker, quilt making could provide a creative outlet in the choice of pattern and arrangement of colours and fabrics. Many represent personal moments of joy, sorrow, friendship, birth, marriage, and death. The stories stitched by her hand into the very fabric of the quilts are the ones we seek to commemorate.

The artists have created exciting new contemporary artworks that meld the modern with the past and connect meanings with memory making. Though quiltmakers today find much inspiration in the centuries-old patterns, these artists yearn to push the medium of quilt-making forward. As part of their creative process, Andrea and Marilyn have experimented with non-traditional materials and pigments both found and new, including the collecting of fabric remnants. In By Her Hand Andrea and Marilyn will delve more deeply into the spatial relationship between the body, quilts, the home, and public spaces.