About The Artist

Nancy Whittington studied at the Rhode Island School of Design and N.C. State School of Design. Her silk textile works have been exhibited in museums in the United States, Europe and Japan. Her public commissions hang in corporate, university and religious institutions. Exhibitions include Craft Today, USA at the Museê des Arts Decoratifs in Paris, the Gulbenkian in Lisbon, and Museê des Arts Decoratifs in Lausanne; Celebrating American Craft at the Danish Museum of Decorative Art in Copenhagen; Selections by the American Museum of Folk Art in New York City; Art Quilts at Pavillon Josephine in Strasbourg, France; Quilt National 2011, 2007, 2005, and 1987 in Ohio, Fabric Gardensin Osaka, Japan and the Brooklyn Botanical Garden; Visions, The Art of the Quilt, in San Diego, and Southern Quilts: A New View at the Georgia Museum of Art. Her work is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Art and Design in New York City, St. Luke’s Hospital in Tokyo, and in private collections in Europe and the United States. She received a 2007 AIA and IFRAA award in Religious Art and Architecture for her commissioned silk tapestry, The Seed and the Flame.

Artist Statement

I work in a textile medium because of the sheer beauty of colors on silk. I dye my own colors, then apply layers of dye in a variety of surface design techniques which include resists, hand-painting, screen printing, discharges, digital ink jet printing, and more. I sew the silk into pieced compositions by hand. Each large scale work is constructed using a full-size paper cartoon based on my original paintings and prints. When a work is complete, the richly colored decorative patterned surface creates an aesthetic different from that of painting.

I have observed in nature that vibrant patterns are created first by the way a single thing grows, like a leaf with its veins, or a wave with its curve, and then by the repetition of forms into many. The presence of light, which changes direction and intensity creates further variations in color, shade and pattern. In the process of making a work of art, the design motifs and images I use become visual metaphors for mysteries of self-contained life, emotions, and the relationship of all living things. I believe the finest works are those which transform the space they occupy and have a mysterious beauty we can look at every day for years.