About

Sarah Merideth works in textiles: dyeing, quilting, and embellishing fabrics. She prefers to work with natural fabrics, primarily cotton and various silks, which yield beautiful colors. She has a BA in Art from Truman State University, with a focus in Fibers. Since then, she has been exploring new techniques and hopes that more art lovers will begin to recognize that Textiles is not just quilting or a craft anymore. Fabric can be manipulated much in the same way as paint, metal, clay, and wood: you can work in two dimensional methods or three dimensional, you can build on it, you can change its appearance. It is what you make of it, as are so many things.

On her more recent work:

“Playing with color. It sounds like work for a child. I feel like a child sometimes working with fabric, drawing out designs and transferring them to fabric.

I love the simple act of adding color to fabric. Taking a plain white piece of cotton and adding depth and patterns to the surface, knowing really that the type of dyes I use go deeper and attach and become a part of the fibers themselves.

My driving force behind my recent body of work is to demonstrate through the work the techniques used to add and remove color on fabric. To show the give and take, the manipulation and resulting design is a wonderful journey. I use the term Transpose to describe this work,  which means literally: to change the relative position, order, or sequence of; cause to change places; interchange. I consider this in terms of color and design. This overall idea encapsulates my love of fabric and it’s possibilities. Not only can you add to the surface, but you can always reverse or remove color and design through different bleaching and discharging techniques. Sometimes the adding and subtracting happens in so many layered steps, I lose track of the journey.  Even a piece that may be small in stature might have many days involved in the processes used to achieve the final result. And the fun and challenges along the way are what build to the final design and impact. “