I am a fiber artist whose work moves between contemplation and confrontation, always in cloth and stitch.
At one end of that range, my work begins with the botanical forms outside my door, the ferns, leaves, and light of the Berkshires landscape, but it does not end there. In the Cyanotypes series, I use the sun print not as image alone but as raw material, cut, layered, and recomposed into stitched fields where botanical form gives way to color, texture, and stitch.
At the other end, I make quilts that bear witness to gun violence, to racism, to the ongoing costs of injustice. These pieces do not dissolve into abstraction. They name things directly.
Across all of this work, quilting is both structure and language for me. The labor of stitching, repetitive, deliberate, embodied, becomes a way of processing and containing complex emotional states. Deep sadness, grief, awe, resilience, and empathy are recurring currents beneath the surface of my work. Sometimes these emotions emerge through explicit social justice pieces that memorialize loss or confront injustice. Increasingly, they are expressed through abstraction, through color, density, interruption, and scale, allowing viewers to encounter feeling without explanation.
That emotional field lives in the physical work itself. I create wall-based works intended to draw viewers in slowly. From a distance, they offer boldness and presence. Up close, they reveal layers of construction, incision, and stitch. I am less interested in illustrating a story than in creating a space where viewers can recognize something unnamed within themselves. My aim is to foster empathy, not by instructing, but by inviting reflection.
About Julie
I have been making fiber art for nearly thirty years, and exhibiting my work publicly since 2019. I live and work between Boston and the Berkshires of western Massachusetts, where the landscape, its ferns, its light, its seasons, finds its way into much of what I make.
My path has been shaped by curiosity more than plan. A first-generation college student who took Arabic on a whim, studied Islamic theology at divinity school, and ended up making geometric quilts inspired by tile work. An artist who felt compelled one June afternoon to make quilts for the victims of mass shootings, found a hallway in Arlington that became a gallery, and joined the board of the arts center that said yes.
That willingness to follow something unexpected has shaped both my life and my art.
