Julie Caffey
Quilter. Fiber Artist. Mover. Writer.
Welcome to my website.
After decades of performance improvisation, site specific and solo performance, paper and book arts, collage, collaboration and more recently painting, I now find myself quilting.
Quilting. In February 2023 I started with a quilting no-no: working with the unruly wriggly unpredictable material of cashmere, specifically my mom’s cashmere. Working with unpredictable materials follows my many years of improvisational practice of playing with / saying 'hello' to what is calling me and listening for what needs to come forward. It took me ten years to cut into my mom’s cashmere sweaters. I can’t do that, I can do it. I must do it. With each new work we destroy and create - hello goddess Kali! There’s beauty in all of it - look what we end up with!
I’m a San Francisco Bay Area native and recently moved to Minnesota. I left the extremes of the earthquakes, drought and fires for the different kinds of extremes here. It is gorgeous to be here.
We are storytelling creatures. I’m a person who needs to tell and hear stories, but maybe it's my short attention span or my belief that stories fall apart and have multiple entry and exit points/ beginnings, middles and ends. In this way I see my improvisational quilts like the non-linear stories I tell and hear: grids that disintegrate, disrupt, reassemble and transform with some mysterious resolution.