Quilts in Women's Lives
A film by Pat Ferrero
"Quilts in Women's Lives" presents a series of first person portraits of quiltmakers, who reveal the passion and values behind this continuing tradition. Film maker Pat Ferrero's portraits of diverse American quiltmakers provide insights into the inspirations for their work, family, tradition, the joy of the creative process, the challenge of design, and how quiltmaking has become a part of their daily lives. Seven women, including a California Mennonite, a Bulgarian immigrant and an African-American from Mississippi are portrayed in the film.
A filmmaker, Pat Ferrero, was intrigued by the quilts and probably by their similarity to her own medium (film): repetitive, pieced-together, slowly evolving patterns out of small details.
"Quilts in Women's Lives" is a deceptively quiet half-hour leaving you fascinated and uplifted -- just as you respond to a magnificent quilt.
The title tells it all: quilts enter lives, record them, parallel them.
Of the seven women seen during the course of the film, some are indeed painters using scraps of material for their medium, and they take traditional painterly attitudes toward their work.
Lucy Hilty, a Mennonite woman now living in Berkeley, talks about her quilts requiring "big areas to express an idea" as she shows a quilt whose subtle color patterns recall the atmospheric abstract paintings of Rothko.
But over and above painting, quiltmaking develops into a metaphor of life itself. "Quilts in Women's Lives" is visual anthropology. It examines by implication quiltmaking as a system of communication, record-keeping and structuring principle.
The film, like the quilts, embodies the reassuring care, the forgiving attention to detail and the fascination of detail and emerging pattern that animates the best of life itself."
-Charles Shere
The Oakland Tribune
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