Cheryl Deene Hurd
ARTIST BIO
Cheryl Hurd is a textile and fiber artist. Her career in the sewing arts has been a lifetime of passion for textiles and design. As an apparel designer and teacher for thirty years, Cheryl wanted to create more interest in her garments. This was accomplished by using techniques normally applied to quilts. Cheryl has been making traditional, improvisational, and abstract quilts for twenty-five years. Her attraction to quilts and the quilted surface is the texture created by piecing and layering fabrics together and the added dimension of the quilt stitch. Combining garments and textile art began the gradual development into Wearable Arts. My cloth creations have come full circle, to accessorize the body, the bed, and the wall. My craft is fiber art. My medium is fabric. My tools are limitless.
ARTIST STATEMENT
The Maps of Migration: Roots and Remnants Series speak to the dispersion of a people from an established ancestral homeland. This is an original series based on stories of human movement from one place to another, over long distances. My maps are reflected in the uprooting of lives and the remnant of what is left. The theme of my work relates to migrating and planting and cultivating roots in new places, while remaining a remnant. Roots are important to our existence. Roots hold us firm to our origin, our ancestry, our family, our culture. Roots are essential in that they reach for what they need to survive, thrive, and to live. Roots spread beneath the surface, underground, anchored by their essence of our source.
The remnants are the parts left behind, the bits and pieces of the whole. Maps of Migration reveal the roots being sustained in their vestige, by the remnant. The quilted surface holds a deep fascination for me and is the perfect canvas to work with.
Cheryl Deene Hurd
Washington, DC, USA