Lavialle Campbell is an artist who works with fabric, thread and a home sewing machine to create contemporary quilts that are non-representational abstractions.  The personal pleasure drives her pieces that meticulous work gives her, labor that requires time and dedication as well as the challenge that results in seeing what large dimensions can be reached or how much accumulation she can generate from these small actions and simple materials.

The artist’s compulsion to create has encompassed everything from creating macramé wall-hangings to seed beadwork to printmaking to painting acrylic flowers on her sister’s Volkswagen when she was a child. She has always incorporated texture into her work, including in ceramics and glass.

Lavialle Campbell wanted to create paintings, but without using materials associated with western art history.  As a feminist, she wanted to use materials that were historically associated with women’s work.  Her work challenges the idea of what paintings can be – what can be called a painting.  Her aesthetic is not based in tradition, but firmly based in modernism, Japanese minimalism, and architecture.  As an improvisational quilter, she can achieve her desired end: Quilting serves the purpose of tactile meditation while solving a puzzle and making a thing that didn’t exist before.

The artists explains:

“Art is my life, and it has saved my life through the years.  I wouldn’t be able to survive without it.”

Return to 9 x 9: Contemporary Quilts & Containers HERE.