Karen Musgrave (KM): I am conducting a Quilters' S.O.S. - Save Our Stories interview with Bean Gilsdorf. I have admired Bean's work and because we can't be together we decided to conduct the interview through e-mail. Our interview is beginning on April 27, 2007. Bean thanks. Please tell me about the quilt that you selected for this interview.

Bean Gilsdorf (BG): "Ghost" is a 35 foot long whole-cloth quilt. The idea for it came when I took my beloved first car, a 1966 Plymouth Valiant 100, to my mechanic, who told me that the car had rusted out so much that it was unsafe to drive. The car had also been an engagement present from my husband, so it had double the sentimental value. At the time, I didn't know how I was going to get along without it. I have been using quilts to memorialize objects and feelings for a while now, so it was a natural step for me to do that with the Valiant. I made some smaller prints of the car first: a few of the details, the front view of the car, the whole passenger side; but none were as grand as the car itself. I wanted to make something monumental, so I decided to print three sides of the car together. The idea for the three sides printed contiguously came from the kind of prize you find in cereal boxes, where the object is printed flat and you fold it ("Insert tab A into slot B") to make a three-dimensional object. Because I was working outside, I needed to finish the printing in one day. I used black fabric paint on about 14 yards of 90" white fabric. The next day, I heat-set the paint by ironing until my arms nearly fell off. Then I dyed the fabric in a gradation, so that the edges would be dark blue, fading to a light blue in the center. This was a real challenge, because that much fabric is hard to control, and extremely heavy when wet. However, I didn't really like the results, so I set the fabric aside for almost a year, made another print of the car, and quilted the second print. Fast forward to 2006: I wanted to finish the quilt, so I decided to experiment and go in a new direction. I ironed it, then chalked a grid onto the fabric, which I used to position paper circles. Then I painted the whole length of the fabric with dark dye paint, let it set, removed the circles, and then scrubbed out the excess in my back yard. After a cycle through the washer and dryer, I laid the fabric out in my driveway and bleached out the car sections. I worked quickly and almost sloppily, because I wanted the gestural car to contrast with the controlled feeling in the grid of dots. Then I rinsed it with the hose, put it in a stop-bath for the bleach, and then washed, dried, and ironed it again. My neighbors think I am very peculiar! Although I normally quilt my own work, 35 continuous feet is more than I can handle by myself, so I took the fabric to a professional computerized quilting service. The quilting was done from my original motif, at the size and repeat that I requested. When it was finished, I trimmed and bound it, and sewed an exhibition sleeve on the back. I have been very lucky to exhibit "Ghost" in Portland, Oregon and in San Pedro, California. This is one of my favorite pieces, and I regret that I don't have space to hang it in my own house.

KM: What do you do with this quilt since you can't hang it? What are your plans for this quilt?

BG: When the quilt is at home, it lives rolled around a custom padded tube, wrapped in a clean sheet, in the guest room. My plan is to keep finding venues for it. When I exhibited it in San Pedro, my husband and I built a custom curved hanging device for it that kept it off the wall and made it more sculptural. This was an interesting approach, one I wasn't sure I could pull off; but I was pleasantly surprised with how much presence it gave the work when it wasn't flat. Now the challenge is to find venues that are large enough to accommodate the work, and rich enough to ship the quilt and the hanger!

KM: Tell me about your interest in quiltmaking? When did you start? From whom did you learn or are you self-taught?

BG: I come from a sewing family and I've sewn my whole life, but I'm the only quilter. I didn't start making quilts until after I got out of graduate school and moved to Portland in 1998. My husband bought me a sewing machine for my birthday, and I started making quilts then. But the funny thing is that I knew I was going to make quilts more than a year before I got that machine: somehow, while in my last year of graduate school, I ended up with a copy of Fons & Porter's "Quilter's Complete Guide" and I used to sit up late at night and read it obsessively after I finished my homework. I was memorizing theory and technique for quilting long before I even had a sewing machine. I guess I'm a self-taught quiltmaker, but to me "self-taught" implies inspiration in a vacuum, like a hermit genius who makes divine objects out of the lowest materials. By contrast, I was sewing so early that I don't even remember having lessons, and I always had books to guide me if I needed help.

KM: You told me you were an English teacher. How do you balance your time?

BG: I work in an intensive-English program for at-risk teenagers at Portland Community College, and my classes are Monday through Thursday. There's a lot of time taken up for meetings and class preparation, but it's still only part-time work, so I have Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays for artwork. I can often squeeze in some time in the studio on weekdays, too. Sometimes it's hard to balance the two careers (especially when I'm working under a deadline, or it's standardized testing time), but it's completely necessary for me. Studio work is intensely solitary, and you're just in your own head for hours and hours on end. The classes I teach give me an opportunity to get out of my head, to be answerable to others in a way that I'm not when I'm in the studio. I was raised in a family where service to others was of great importance, and artwork can be a completely selfish pursuit; the time I spend with my students allows me that mental space to be by myself---without guilt, without apology---in the studio. And the solitary experience of studio work permits me to be wholeheartedly giving when I'm with my students.

KM: I've managed to combine my quiltmaking with service to others. It's the best of both worlds.

BG: I know many people who have done this, but it's important to me to keep the two separated in a very basic way. I donate a lot of my work to fundraisers and charity auctions, so the end result is sometimes service to others, but I don't it want to be my focus when I step into the studio.

KM: Do you think of yourself more as an artist or a quiltmaker or do you even make a distinction?

BG: Over the last few years I have been making installations and collaborating with my husband on several mixed-media projects, so I call myself an artist. When people ask what I make, though, I say, 'Primarily, quilts.'

KM: Describe your studio.

BG: My studio is 11' x 11', with two north-facing windows and a deep, skinny closet. I use the two unbroken walls for quilts in progress, and the two walls with windows and doors for my desk, materials, and corkboard. All over the walls are taped-up bits of paper: photos, postcards from friends, notes to myself, to-do lists, sketches, quotes from books, reminders of various sorts, ideas for future work, etc. The door to my studio is sky blue and has a quote taped on it about the Zen concept of Beginner's Mind, which is the practice of approaching the world like a baby, with an open and curious mind (instead of coming to it with preconceived ideas, which is what I mainly do; but it's good to have reminders).

KM: You gave me a great lead in for my next questions. Do you sketch and plan things or do you let them unfold?

BG: I am a big fan of the sketchbook, which is ironic considering how much I resisted using one in college. These days I put everything in mine: drawings, to-do lists, websites, sources for materials, phone numbers. That's not to say that everything I have made so far has been planned to the n-th degree. Even with a sketch, there is a certain amount of uncertainty as to where things are going when the work starts. I often begin a project the way it's sketched out, but find that I change my mind, or use a different technique than planned, or a different scale because of the way the work unfolds. Even though I may move through a piece organically, I still love my sketchbook because it reliably gives me a place to start, and because it's great to have all my ideas in one place. I'm the kind of person who works in two sketchbooks at once: the first is a new book for ideas that I want to record now, the second is a full book of old ideas that I'm still working through. It takes me a while for things percolate in my mind, and sometimes it's good to let an idea develop over time.

KM: What are your favorite techniques and materials?

BG: Most of the time I work with 100% cotton. I like to use fabric paint and dye (liquid and thickened), and lots of my recent work has been bleached, too. I like adding and subtracting to the surface, creating layers of color.

KM: Have advances in technology influenced your work? And if so, how?

BG: No, I don't think so. I use a very simple, non-computerized sewing machine, and my backup machine is from the 60s. I don't like a machine that does your thinking for you! The dye processes I use are no-frills kinds of things: freezer paper stencils, folding and clamping, hand-painting. However, I'm not a complete Luddite. I am interested in some of the new computerized dye-printing processes, if only to understand the theory and technique. I have no idea how I would use it in my quilts, though, since I think that the look of the hand in the work is important.

KM: Which artists and/or quiltmakers have influenced you? Whose works are you drawn to and why?

BG: There are so many artists whose work has directly or indirectly influenced me that it's hard to narrow it down. For the past couple of years my favorite artist has been Sigmar Polke, a German painter and photographer. He has created an enormous body of work that I am drawn to not just because it's magnificent, but because throughout his career he has been unafraid to experiment. His paintings, especially, are simultaneously intuitive, humorous, dark, and often lyrical; and his photographs epitomize the concept of working through an idea again and again. His work gets better and better, and is an embodiment of what is possible through a lifetime of hard work as an artist. When I am stuck or frustrated, it's inspiring to remember that the payoff for all this hard work now is the chance, in 20 or 30 years, to create something worthwhile, something truly genius, that will stand the test of time as a work of art.

KM: Why is quiltmaking important to your life?

BG: Quiltmaking is gratifying for me in a very unique way that other art media have not yet matched. It requires very specialized knowledge and skills to make even a basic quilt, and I get a lot of enjoyment out of sewing a straight, controlled line of stitches, or binding a quilt by hand. Although my work is conceptually based, I still derive a lot of pleasure from pure technique.

KM: Is "Ghost" typical of your style? How about the size? Do you work in a series? I know that I have seen several of your quilts that a fingerprint and a gun in them.

BG: "Ghost" is pretty typical of my style and technique, but the size is pretty abnormal for me (although it is the second very long car quilt I've made). Working that big has its own challenges. It seems like every time you double your normal, comfortable working size (and mine is somewhere in the range of 40"-70") you ramp up the level of difficulty by a factor of ten. But, for me, the payoff is totally worth it. Because I'm printing from objects themselves, the object is what determines the scale of a piece. It would be impossible for me to depict the car in that particular way in a different size. When I started quilting I thought in terms of a series, which is why you will find some earlier titles for quilts being #1, #2, and so on. Nowadays, I don't really think about working in a series per se because it feels artificial and confining to me. What I have found is that, when you are making work all the time, and if you are developing your own vision, everything you make will be part of a body of work (which naturally contains repetition of themes). As such, it amounts to the same thing as a series, but over a lifetime.

KM: Very nice food for thought. What advice would you offer someone starting out?

BG: Well, it's hard to give generic advice when everyone comes to the table with a different set of skills and ideas; but if you want to make art quilts, I would say: get a couple of key reference books on basic foundational techniques, make sure your machine works the way you want it to, and then just make what's in your head. If you want to look at what other people are making, go to galleries and museums instead of looking at art quilt books. Make friends with quiltmakers AND artists in other media. Be true to yourself. Art making involves the soul, so don't compromise your ideals.

KM: And what do you think is the biggest challenge confronting art quiltmakers?

BG: Our biggest challenge is to find a way to get out of the quilt pigeonhole, both as a group and as individuals. On the whole, there has been so much progress in the last 35 years, but quilts are still not recognized as a legitimate art form in the same way as the canonical media of painting, photography, or sculpture. It's really incumbent on the individual to not compartmentalize their own work by only pursuing fibers magazines, fibers/craft galleries, and quilting friends. Everyone needs a support network for what they're doing, but it's also important to guard against ghettoizing your own mind and processes. To stay in the comfort zone of the fibers world, only interacting with those who validate and support your work, is to internalize the limitations that the art world as a whole imposes on quiltmakers. We do need to support each other, but we need to pursue support from other domains, as well.

KM: Do you belong to any art or quilt groups?

BG: For professional groups, I am a member of Studio Art Quilt Associates and the Surface Design Association.

KM: Let's move more into aesthetics and design. What do you think makes a quilt artistically powerful?

BG: I think what makes any work of art powerful is a strong marriage of concept and vision with technique. I like work that challenges my assumptions and makes me see something in a new way. I want to be surprised, to feel that the work is the product of deep thought or feelings; and to feel like the artist was committed to its execution in a very primal way.

KM: Is there anything else that you would like to add?

BG: I wonder if I should state for the record that I love traditional quilts. So many people have the impression that art quilters turn up their noses at more conventional works, but I admire them. Aside from being beautiful, classic quilts have such a rich history and I respect the amount of work that goes into them. Although I stopped collecting books about art quilts, I can't seem to quit buying books about traditional quilts.

KM: I couldn't agree more so thanks for adding this. Thanks also for taking your time to do this interview with me. Our interview concluded on April 29, 2007.