Sewing With Nancy

What happens when an artist who specializes in painting discovers the virtue of fabric and thread?

The answer

amazing artwork. Please welcome Gina Phillips, who joins us via Skype from her studio in New Orleans. Nice to see you, Gina. Hi, Nancy, great to meet you. Thanks for inviting me on the show. You're very welcome. I saw your work of art "Fort Dirt Hole" at the Crystal Bridges Museum in Arkansas. I studied that image for what seemed like hours. It was so impressive, and I knew you had to be my guest. Why don't you give our viewers a little history of your works-- how you work in art? Well, I started out as a mixed media painter. And I grew up in Kentucky and really-- my grandmother was a folk artist, and everybody in my family worked with their hands, so I had a lot of raw materials on hand to make art with. And so I started out as a painter, and I moved to New Orleans in 1995 to attend graduate school at Tulane University. And I started paring down my materials and focusing on layering fabric, painting on fabric, and then at a certain point, I kind of made the leap and started using fabric as my palette. And I have to say, I don't really know how to sew properly, and I actually watch your show and learn a lot of practical tips, but I'm kind of a renegade quilter. I use a longarm quilting machine, and I use it like a drawing-with-thread machine. And I start out with an underpainting-- an underdrawing and an underpainting and then I appliqu all kinds of fabrics and materials and almost anything goes, and I sew it onto the surface. And your surface has a lot of texture. That's what I was so impressed with, and I like the term "renegade" sewer or quilter because that describes it, but also, you're a master at it. Now, your works of art are not small. The-- the art piece that I appreciated is large. Explain how large it is. Yeah, this is the largest piece I've ever made. It's 13 1/2' tall by about 24' long. And even though my longarm quilter is-- you know, works on a very large frame, even this piece was too large to fit on the frame, so I had to divide it into three sections and work on it in parts, and then at the end, I hand-sewed all the three panels together and made a huge piece. And it was originally shown at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art and then it was in the State of the Art show in Bentonville at Crystal Bridges, which was an amazing show, and that was two years ago now, in 2014. Gives me chills, just remembering the beautifulness. Thank you. Now, you work with a longarm quilting machine, as you say, in a kind of renegade form, but that came about from a tragedy. Yes, that's true. I've been living in New Orleans since 1995, and I had purchased my first home in the Lower Ninth Ward neighborhood of New Orleans in 2004, and a year later, my house flooded in Hurricane Katrina. So all of my equipment-- and at that time, you know, like I said, I was never really trained to sew properly, or-- and so I was just kind of devising methods on my own and I was just using a regular household sewing machine at that time, and so because I lost all of my equipment, the silver lining in that was that it forced me to re-examine my working methods. And I didn't even know anything about longarm quilting machines, but I learned about them and tried one out and could see the potential for-- the way I use the sewing machine, it's my dream machine. I use it like a drawing machine, and it's very versatile for me. Some of the other-- explain some of your other favorite works of art that we can share with our viewers. Well, there's a portraiture series that-- there's actually an example behind me, a portrait of my dog, Daisy. Mm-hmm. And so I've done several portraits of people and animals or people holding their dogs or their babies or-- and it's-- you know, I'm very-- I try to be very bold with my color choices and in my choice of materials. For example, the portrait of Daisy behind me is made almost entirely of... wigs, wig hair, and hair extensions that you would buy at the beauty supply store. And so there's amazing colors now that-- in fake hair, essentially, and so I use that as my palette, and so anything goes, an d I'll sew it on the surface. Well, your workmanship is admirable, and I love the fact, how you combine-- you basically paint the background a little bit, then you add fabric, stitch on fabric, and make it jump off the palette. That's true. I do-- I start out with an under painting. I use Golden Fluid Acrylics, a very highly pigmented fluid paint. It has-- it doesn't have a body to it, so it's very easy. It kind of acts as a stain or a dye on the fabric. And then I use that as kind of my guide, and then I appliqu all of my fabrics on top of that. That's kind of my road map. Well, Gina, thank you for being with us, and I'm sure others will enjoy seeing your works of art at museums. Thank you again. Well, thank you-- thank you so much, Nancy. Thank you for joining us at home. We'll be back for more programs of Sewing with Nancy next season. Thanks for joining us. Bye for now.