This week’s DMTV Milkshake guest is visual artist Lisa Hunt.
Lisa Hunt makes hugely dramatic works-on-paper – a product of her spectacular use of 24k gold leaf and her ultra-dynamic patterns and shapes. While her screen-printed works have long taken inspiration from the textiles world, this past year she channeled a new and specific source: the famed quilts of the Gee’s Bend community in rural Alabama. This evolution came at a time when Hunt was eager to work outside of screen-printing, which requires a time-demanding and precise process. “I’ve been working for the most part in screen-printing as a medium – works-on-paper, on canvas, with ink and gold leaf – but last fall, I was really feeling like I wanted to be able to kind of work more quickly with my hands,” Hunt says. “I wanted to be able to create something without having to go through the whole screen-printing process.”
Enter the Gee’s Bend quilts, which Hunt describes as “the most amazing, beautiful works of textile art that I’ve ever seen.” “I just started doing a little research about the process and the history of African-American quilt-making, the history of enslaved Africans, and the culture that they brought with them from the different countries that they came from in West Africa,” Hunt says. Crucial to that art-making process was cutting strips of fabric and sewing them together to create larger works. “I decided to take existing works and use them as my material,” Hunt says. Watch the video to see the results – including one of her earliest pieces in this style, which incorporates strips of her piece “Love & Arrows” mounted to a wood board. “It’s one of the first pieces where I started playing with collage, and I just fell in love with the process,” she says. Tune in to see the fruits of that beautiful evolution.
Diana Ostrom, who has written for Wallpaper, Interior Design, ID, The Wall Street Journal, and other outlets, is also the author of Faraway Places, a newsletter about travel.
Milkshake, DMTV (Design Milk TV)’s first regular series, shakes up the traditional interview format by asking designers, creatives, educators and industry professionals to select interview questions at random from their favorite bowl or vessel. During their candid discussions, you’ll not only gain a peek into their personal homeware collections, but also valuable insights into their work, life and passions.
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