When Cathy
Fussell first started sewing, her hands were barely coordinated enough
to hold a needle. She was only four years old then, but the following
year, she attended her first quilting bee. “Every woman in my family
sewed,” she says. “It was just assumed that I would, too.”
Now Fussell reigns as a grande dame of
quilting, following an idiosyncratic and distinctly Southern muse. Born
in 1949 and raised in Buena Vista, Georgia, she carries on the family
tradition one dexterous stitch at a time in nearby Columbus. “Quilts are
about history and art and politics and stories,” she writes in her
mission statement, “and they’re feminized and devalued. All that is why
I’m so into quilts and quilt making.”
In other words, these are not your
granny’s quilts. Each of Fussell’s creations reveals its own tactile,
bas-relief cosmology, often with hillocks, crenellated rows of farmland,
and “the creeks where I used to misbehave,” she says. “I think of my
quilts as celebrations of family, literature, history, and the
landscape.”
Storytelling comes naturally. She met her
future husband, Fred Fussell, in the folklore program at Georgia State
University, and they embarked from there on a lifelong calling of
cultural preservation, starting with jobs at Historic Westville, an
old-timey village where Cathy worked as a weaver and spinner. Later, she
taught literature and directed Columbus’s Carson McCullers Center for
Writers and Musicians.
When she retired, in 2011, she devoted
herself full-time to quilting. Her elaborate patterns can punch up
traditional styles, such as her freewheeling grid of Georgia peaches;
echo nature scenes, as in her clever five coral snakes crossing a
highway; and pay homage to other artists, from Matisse to the
Columbus-born painter Alma Woodsey Thomas—the Congressional Club in
Washington, D.C., in fact, commissioned one such piece from Fussell as a
gift for then First Lady Michelle Obama. Another of her quilts depicts
the story line of William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying—“with that
scoundrel Anse Bundren!” she says. A cartography buff, Fussell also
makes “topo,” or topographical, quilts based on U.S. Geological Survey
maps. One of her favorites, Snake Shoals on the Chattahoochee,
features a bend in the river using a “jeans” thread flecked with silver
filament to simulate the water. “I’ve quilted the
Chattahoochee-Flint-Apalachicola river basin so many times I could do it
in my sleep.”
Altogether, Fussell estimates she has
crafted at least three hundred quilts—“I stopped counting a while ago,”
she says—working every day in her studio in the Swift Mill Lofts, near a
quilt her grandmother and great-grandmother made in the 1930s. Her
pieces have racked up medals at juried shows, including one for second
place in hand quilting at the prestigious modern quilting show QuiltCon.
Fussell’s daughter, Coulter, who earned a
BFA in painting and drawing at Ole Miss, says she never thought about
quilting herself, “because what Mom does involves so much mathematical
precision, and I just didn’t think I had the mind for that.” But fifteen
years ago, some swatches caught her eye. “I said, ‘Mom, if I cut these
out, will you sew them down?’” Since then, mother and daughter have
collaborated and exhibited their work at joint showings, and Coulter has
opened a studio and store called YaloRun Textiles in Water Valley,
Mississippi. “Cathy is a formalist whose work is precise—she draws with
stitches,” says Ted Whisenhunt, who organized a show featuring the two
at Georgia’s Young Harris College. “Coulter’s work is made from scraps
of donated fabrics, sometimes painted by her. Other elements are
layered, giving a collage-like effect. I see elements akin to a
Rauschenberg or a Klee.”
Coulter views herself as a stitch in time. “I’m just the latest in a very long, multigenerational story.”
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