I’m Emily Campbell and this is the story of Pemberton Qwilts.
In my twenties I was a pattern maker for the fashion designer Jean Muir, and an accomplished dress and costume maker. So I knew how to sew, but my quilts are really driven by the visual principles I learned in my later training and practice as a graphic designer at Yale School of Art and Pentagram in New York.
When I look at traditional patchwork, I marvel at the geometric phenomena that (mostly) women down the centuries discovered on their laps and at their fingertips – by cutting and combining and rotating shapes; or simply by stitching pieces of cloth right sides together and opening them to create a new shape that straddles a seam.
In 2012 a quilt made from old denim and canvas work clothes in an exhibition about Gees Bend (the famed quilting community in Alabama) prompted me to up-cycle the family’s old jeans into my first patchwork quilt. I studied rhythm, rule and variation in Anni Albers’s pattern drawings. I looked at Gustav Kilmt, Victor Pasmore and Ellsworth Kelly for inspiration, and many more artists besides. I interpreted traditional patchwork geometry but, on the whole and for the time being, dispensed with the floral prints.
In 2019 I designed a modular patchwork alphabet. My ‘pandemic project’, Evensong I (see Hand Quilts) is the seed of an evolving collection of typographic quilts bearing messages of comfort and protection.
Sheila Frances Hayes, née Pemberton, taught me to sew.
Homepage photograph by Angela Moore www.angela-moore.co.uk
This portrait and beach photography by Michael Donald www.michaeldonald.com
Studio photography and Contact portrait by Laura Hodgson