Featuring the works of Sharon Baker and Elaine Bowles. Click here to see an interview with Sharon Baker.
Our journey began with a commitment to walk the nature trails that surround Boise, Idaho. We challenged each other to create quilt art using a depicted chosen theme. We were going to write in our journals and create a small square weekly/monthly for a year. Soon after this commitment, a roadblock instantly stopped all progress and enthusiasm. Commitment, challenge, and theme, boxed in the original creative power we were trying to set free. After weeks of frustration and failure, but good exercise walking the nature trails, we abandoned the initial concept.
We realize that our friendship and polar opposite personalities have created the real collaboration. We are Yin and Yang. Now our weekly walks are used to express our own creative vision to expand each other’s vision. We make many trips together with our journals now, not to limit, but to brainstorm, and mind map our visions with each other, always pushing the limit. Like Alice seeing into the looking glass, through each other’s eyes we can see the center we have been searching.
Our success has created an appreciation of the other’s opposite nature. Elaine: yin, controlled, plodding, the realist. Sharon: yang, flighty, erratic, the dreamer. Our work itself shows our progress. Sharon’s body of work, “Personal Shelter,” depicts how her work captures her flighty nature. Her work explores the kimono form. Elaine’s body of work, “Unleashed,” depicts how she is allowing her earthy nature to reach for the sky. Her work encompasses the art quilt; incorporating fabrics, as well as wire mesh, metal shim, beads, and other ephemera into her work.
