The 10th International Collage Exchange is now online at http://virtual.tart.co.nz/. Dale Copeland, the organizer and collage evangelist, puts and amazing amount of work into these exchanges. 159 artists, each sending in 13 collages, and somehow Dale keeps it all straight.

I’m very pleased to be paired to exhibit with a widely-praised local painter, Jason Craighead, through Raleigh’s municipal arts program. The exhibition, Macrocosm/Macrocosm, opens this Friday. Reception: Fri, Feb 1, 5-7pm with a poetry reading. One of my images was chosen for the postcard, above. (Click the thumbnail for a bigger image.)

Microcosm/Macrocosm
Art by Jason Craighead & Tricia McKellar
February 1 – March 13, 2008
Municipal Building Art Exhibitions
Miriam Preston Block Gallery
222 West Hargett St, Raleigh, NC
www.raleighnc.gov/arts

bird in digital shibori landscape, 18″h x 36″w, fiber, 2006
digital prints on silk of altered shibori imagery, cardinal photograph, & other images, hand & machine quilted

I shipped this quilt off yesterday to the C&T Publishing special exhibition “Innovative Fabric Imagery: A Digital Exploration in Quilting” at the 2007 Fall International Quilt Market & Quilt Festival (Houston, Oct 27- Nov 4). This work is featured in the companion book “Innovative Fabric Imagery for Quilts.”

You can see more of my quilts here.

My show in Chapel Hill was hung today…. whew! A really big thanks goes out to Marni Goldshlag and Delores Hamilton for hooking me up with this opportunity!

unlikely + beautiful
digital & textile collages
by Tricia McKellar

at the Community Church of Chapel Hill, Unitarian Universalist
106 Purefoy Road
Chapel Hill, NC 27510
919-942-2050

September 15 – October 26, 2007

*** Artist’s Reception: Sunday, September 23, 1-3pm ***

Just touching base– I’ve got a busy weekend in the studio ahead of me.

I’m getting ready to hang my exhibition at the Unitarian Universalist Church in Chapel Hill next weekend. More details on this coming soon! If you’re going to be in the Chapel Hill area, mark your calendar for the reception: Sunday, Sept 23, 1-3pm.

I’m also continuing work on some NEW series that I hope will be ready by November!

[Image above: detail from Five Birds with Nest print available from my etsy shop]

I just got an envelope of postcards and a poster(!) for the show at Morehead State University. I was totally surprised to find they picked an image of my work for the publicity! The image is a detail from Insect Machine #6.

Other artists in the exhibition: Rachel B. Abrams, Lauren Lipiniski Eisen, Tom Rice, Susan Maakestad, Michael McFalls, and Leisel Whitlock.

I’m thrilled to be invited to show in a special exhibition at the Greater Chicago Quilt Exhibition! From the Mancuso announcement:
Digital Shibori: Pattern & Stitch
Fiber Works by Tricia McKellar
Tricia McKellar presents a series of fiber works that explore pattern and stitch. McKellar hand-dyes shibori fabric. Her shibori is a modern adaptation of traditional Japanese hand-dye methods. Shibori techniques produce patterned fabric with subtle variations; the patterns are natural, organic, complex, and, somehow, simple. McKellar photographs her shibori, digitally alters the image and prints the digital collage to silk. The works wrestle with the theme: How do the natural and the man-made, the organic and the digital feed each other? Each work is an exploration of another permutation.
Greater Chicago Quilt Exposition
11/8/2007 – 11/11/2007
Schaumburg, IL

Shibori Building
digital prints of altered shibori imagery and photographs on silk, machine and hand stitched
18″h x 36″w, ©2006

I’m honored that my work Shibori Building is included in this exhibition:

Art Quilts Lowell 2007
Brush Art Gallery
256 Market St., Lowell, MA 01852
August 2 through October 28, 2007

I’m thrilled to be invited to participate in this exhibition:

A Natural Order: Art Exploring the Organic & Artifice
Morehead State University
Morehead, Kentucky
August 29 – September 21, 2007

I’m sending 10 works from the Plans & Diagrams series. Thanks to Jennifer Reis, Gallery Director and the folks at Morehead State for this opportunity!

I am fascinated by natural patterns, divine systems, man’s machines, and the everyday junk all around us. Collected images of machines, insects, technical drawings, and kitschy junk form a soup of design and chance. My works often wrestle with a theme that returns to me over and over again; how does all the stuff of our lives fit together? Is it a neat equation? How do chance and chaos contribute to our circumstance? How do the organic and the digital coexist? Each collage is an exploration of another permutation, another tangle of objects.

Digital collages from my Plans & Diagrams series will be on display in the Artspace Lobby in June. Maybe it’s time to order frames :)

image: Plans & Diagrams #4

See more of this series