Andra Stanton
After trying to match up corners and points in traditional quilt making – and failing miserably – Andra Stanton found her solution when Rayna Gilman published her book, Create Your Own Free-Form Quilts (C&T Publishing, 2011). Andra enjoyed creating these “wonky” art quilts until she stumbled on an art quilt magazine article describing how to form 3D houses from fabric, stiff interfacing, and stitching.
From there, this artist was hooked on 3D textile art. Finding only one other example in another magazine, she decided to seek out fiber artists here in the US and around the world who specialized in 3D art, and to compile them for a book ultimately published by Schiffer Publishing in 2018, Dimensional Cloth: Sculpture by Contemporary Textile Artists. Since then, Andra has been exploring a wide variety of techniques for her 2D and 3D art quilts such as felting, mono-printing, silk-screening, leaf-printing, eco-dyeing, and so on, on her own and with local art quilt groups.
Overcome with grief during the last couple of years because of the world’s political strife, Andra found herself turning to her art to express that grief. Realizing how profound an impact art can have in communicating her sorrow, and sometimes in ameliorating her grief, she decided to seek out other artists who use their work to explore their own pain and suffering. Ultimately, that art became a part of her most recent book, How Art Heals, published by Schiffer in 2021.
For the next while, Andra is writing her next book, Japanese Paper Yarn and Beyond, to be released by Schiffer in 2024.
