Sydney Lee
Raleigh, NC
Sydney Lee is a seventh generation quilter who is also new to WINTER SHOW. While working on her BFA in drawing and printmaking at UNCG, she began exploring the ideas of modern quilting as a means for connection to her own personal heritage. The large cotton quilt in GreenHill’s WINTER SHOW entitled Sullivan, Wharton, Courtland, Latham, N. Church was created in Greensboro before Lee moved to Raleigh to be a Regional Artist in Residence at ArtSpace where she now maintains a studio.
In contrast to traditional quilt designs, the motifs in Lee’s work are inspired by the local architecture of five Greensboro addresses.
Lee explains: "For Sullivan, Wharton, Latham, Courtland, N. Church I had already been thinking about place-based contemporary quilting, but I wanted to get out of my comfort zone and into places that I had never been before. I used a random address generator and set a radius of five miles with my old Greensboro apartment as the epicenter. I took my sketchbook and went to go visit the five addresses that I was given and drew from the architecture of each place. I tend to look for a mix of interesting geometric and organic shapes that are tied to each place, and then I take them back to the studio and create small mockups that then become the larger quilt.”
After completing the quilt, Lee returned to the sites that inspired it:
“. . . I took the quilt back to each address and photographed it in the environments as a way to tie it back to its roots. I find it most interesting to see how a home-based object such as a quilt exists in outdoor spaces and how it changes the way a viewer can see the piece.”
In her studio, Sydney has also been working on smaller fiber art works based on her new neighborhood. They are currently on view in WINTER SHOW.
