Textile artist, Alexandra Kingswell, is driven by a passion for color. “Color!” she exclaims on her website, “I love it when it creates drama and impact, when it dances before your eyes, when it stirs the soul and fires the imagination.”
Her fascination with color sparked at a young age, and she remembers sorting her colored pencils into pleasing sequences as a child. After a degree in communications design and a career as a graphic designer, Kingswell discovered her second love, that of textiles.
Combining both passions for color and textile, she now creates quilt-like textile art which reminds of stained glass. Her work is characterized by vibrant colors and strong, geometric shapes through which she seeks a colorful physical expression of mathematical ideas. “I want my work to lift spirits and make people smile!” she writes, “And also intrigue them a little!”
Using mainly solid color fabrics in bright and saturated hues, her patchwork is very precisely sewn and contains no embellishments (“it has to be that way so there is no distraction from the colors and sequences,” explains Kingswell). Depending on the work, she sometimes stretches the finished design over a canvas stretcher. Other pieces are left flexible.
What emerges often appears random, but is actually very far from random. “I get pleasure from creating things – things that are so much more than the sum of their parts – finding new patterns by exploring the beauty of color, number, sequence, and proportion through the medium of fabric,” writes Kingswell. “Starting with a harmonious color-scheme, sometimes inspired by a poem or other text, or a special number, I impose a mathematical sequence, cut, rearrange according to the sequence, and see what happens.”
Take a look at her delightful results:
