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Born in West Virginia, quilt artist Virginia Dambach, has lived in Fargo for twenty one years. During her first quarter century, Virginia attempted almost every craft known – macramé, pottery, stained glass, decopage, painting and more. In quilting over the past 25 years she says she has gained the skill that allows her to express her creativity while controlling the medium. She has always loved collage and is fascinated by its applications within the quilt medium. While most of her work has been in traditional appliqué, the freedom provided by the collage techniques results in a complex blending of fabrics, textures and layers that she finds pleasing as well as exciting.
I originally considered completing a full size bison, but found, for my medium at least, the table top bison to be much more manageable. I approached this bison as an extension of my recent collage quilts – it just doesn’t require quilting! I’ve layered elements of various fabrics to tell a story of the settlement of the prairie. The interplay of the fabrics I’ve juxtaposed, create an image that portrays the bison as part of the natural landscape – wild grasses, cone flowers, wild berries. – which then evolve (or devolve) into wheat fields, sunflowers and other cultivated crops that became more common as the bison disappeared from the landscape. Across the bison’s shoulders, the grasses and wild prairie roses evolve into the cultivated garden roses and flowers that that yearly expand as land is removed from farming and divided into housing plots. I am honored to have been selected to create a table top bison and to be a part of the “Herd About the Prairie”.
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