About the Artist

A reader, writer, and teacher, Rebecca Cross has taught composition and literature for many years. She has also sung at the professional level. Formally trained as a bel canto singer at the Oberlin Conservatory, she has performed contemporary art music in a range of venues. The worlds of music and books continue to fascinate and inform her visual art, which has become a central passion since she began in 1989 to make quilts.

Intrigued by how all art must traverse the imagined and the material, Cross believes that the imagined is what resides in our dreams, thoughts, and memories; the material helps us "voice" these. Dreaming her way into art work allows her to explore what is captivating, troubling, deeply beautiful, or mysterious - sometimes doing so while quite literally holding on by a thread.

Her first pregnancy inspired many of the ideas in her early art quilts, and she subsequently enlarged the scope of her investigations by uncovering the layers of meaning embedded in folktales, fairy tales, poetry and myths. These narratives provided a psychic residence for imagination during the making of work.

Recent forays into shibori tying, dyeing and shape-resist techniques, primarily in silk, coupled with nuno-felting with wool on silk, continue to develop reflections on and expressions of memory. Shibori and felting processes embed memory in color and form in fabric, often in collaged layers. These processes provide a rich metaphor for the ways in which life experiences create multiple palimpsests as one proceeds forward in time, while simultaneously spiraling back into memory.