Lindsay Stead received formal training in furniture and textile design. One of her professors introduced her to the Quilters of Gee's Bend, Alabama, a group of women who have been quilting for over a century. With few resources, they were able to produce striking abstract designs. "Sticking mainly to solid colours, and using slightly altered versions of traditional quilt patterns, they made pieces that are truly works of art," Stead says. "Their completely changed my perception of what a quilt could be and I began working on some of my own." Stead based this piece off of a traditional log cabin motif but focused on a corner of the pattern and introduced different colors into the horizontal and vertical bands.
"For me, the process of hand quilting really solidifies my connection with each quilt and makes the work very personal, almost as if each stitch holds a memory for me," says designer Lindsay Stead. "In this era of making objects as quickly as possible, I think that what I am doing is sadly very rare." Stead bases her patterns off of traditional motifs but introduces a modern twist by playing with positive and negative space, low and high contrast colors, and a variety of scales. "I have been categorized by others—and now have begun to adopt this classification myself—as a modern quilter, but I feel that my work really blurs the line between traditionalism and modernism," she says. We're taken with her sensibility, modern or traditional or everywhere in between.
