Spotlight: Cathy Fussell, Fiber Artist

Cathy Fussell has been sewing since she was a young child. After retirement, she pursued quilting as a full-time occupation. Her daughter, an art student, came home from college and asked to play with scraps of fabric. Cathy sewed them into a piece of fiber art. That led to several collaborative pieces and the impetus to create her own designs.

How long have you been quilting and designing? How did you get started?

My mother got me started sewing with simple embroidery, sewing on buttons when I was 4 or so years old. 

I made my first quilt when I was 19 years old, and I haven’t stopped. I’m 75 now.

The way I got started quilting is that the mother of friends of mine started to quilt in a revivalist sort of trend popular in the late 60s, early 70s. I watched her and got started quilting. 

Then, later, I taught school and worked other jobs for my whole adult life. In 2011, I retired and immediately began to pursue quilting as a full-time “occupation.”  I had no idea that quilting would be anything but a hobby. I had a couple or so strokes of good luck, and now I have a completely unanticipated second career as a quilter. 

Why textiles? 

I think it has a lot to do with the tactile nature of cloth. I simply like the way cloth feels; I like to handle cloth. I can’t imagine working with hard or brittle materials. I greatly admire folks who work with wood or glass or steel or whatever, but I personally wouldn’t take pleasure in working with those materials. 

Is quilting and working with textiles a family tradition? 

Oh, yes. My family had quilted in the past. We had stacks of quilts to prove it. By the time I was born in 1949, they had stopped quilting and focused on dressmaking.

My mother took great pride and pleasure in her sewing. She did not make quilts, but she made clothes and costumes for my 5 siblings and me. My maternal grandmother, out in Louisiana, sewed, and so did most if not all my aunts.

In the small Georgia town where I grew up, in the 1950s and 60s, almost every woman I knew sewed. There was a lively sewing vibe going on there, as I think it probably was in most places around the U.S. at that time. 

How does your environment influence your creativity?

For one thing, I live within walking distance of the Chattahoochee River, so the river has become a focus of much of my quilting. Also, there’s a lively arts community here in Columbus, and the encouragement and support I receive from that group fuels my creativity, for sure. 

Do you do series work? How does that affect your approach?

It appears that I do work in series, but I don’t necessarily set out to do that. 

What happens is that I have an idea – for instance, making a quilt of a black hole. I make one, and after I finish the first one I see how I can maybe improve on the first one, or approach the topic in a slightly different way. Before I know it I’ve made five or so black hole quilts.

I don’t usually set out to make a series, but the series happens. 

When it comes to creating, are you more of a planner or an improviser?

I guess I’m more of a planner.  Sometimes I’d like to be more of an improviser. 

Are you a “finisher”? How many UFOs do you think you have?

I’m a finisher.  I have maybe 4 or so UFOs in my studio, but they’re from all my many years quilting. Everything else I’ve ever started, I’ve finished. 

Scraps. Saver? Or be done with them?

Save, Baby, save! I save just about everything except thread tails. 

How often do you start a new project? Do you work actively on more than one project at a time?

I do work on several projects at one time.

Back when I was working and raising kids and all that, I worked on only one piece at a time, and I worked on it until completion, which took a while since I didn’t have much time to quilt.

Once I retired, in 2011, my process changed, and I started, unconsciously at first, to work on more than one piece. The reasons I work on multiple pieces are several: Sometimes I’m waiting for materials to be delivered. Sometimes I have a deadline – with a show or a commission – and I need to stop working on one project for long enough to meet the deadline for another. And, sometimes I simply put an unfinished piece on my design wall so that I can look at it for a while and carefully and slowly make design decisions. 

Can you tell us about the inspiration and process of one of your works? How does a new work come about? 

Inspiration comes to me from all over the place. I never know where it’s going to come from. It can be something I see, or something I hear, or an emotion I feel. The sources of my inspiration are vast. 

Since you asked about the inspiration and process of one of my works, I’ll give you this one:  This very elderly man in our community, one of our local historians, called me and offered me his lifetime collection of neckties. In fact, he called and messaged me several times, offering me his ties. 

Well, I’d seen necktie quilts, some of them beautiful and many of them boring. I wasn’t feeling the urge to make a necktie quilt, mainly because I didn’t want to make what others had already made, and I couldn’t think of something really new and exciting to do with neckties. 

My elderly friend got really old and was moving out of his lifetime home and I pretty much “took pitysakes on him,” as we say, and I went to his house and retrieved the HUGE leaf and litter bag full of neckties. With my husband’s help I lugged that bag home and into my studio, where it occupied far too much space. I began to try to think about what in the world, other than haul them to GoodWill, could I do with all those ties. I thought hard.

At some point over the next few days, an idea, in the form of a pun, came to me. Here it is: This area where I live was once the home of the Muscogee Creek Nation. In the past as now, the waters on the Coweta Falls of the Chattahoochee River at Columbus, Georgia, are treacherous.

The dangers that are present here were explained by the Muscogee Creeks in the form of a mythological creature known as a “tie snake” which would wrap itself around the ankles and legs of a swimmer and pull them beneath the water and into the underworld, thus explaining the many drownings that happen and have happened along this stretch of the river. 

I was familiar with this myth. See the pun? Ties, tie-snakes? My idea was to make snakes from the ties, and sew those tie-snakes down to something that looked like water. That’s what I did. The result is my “The Myth of the Chattahoochee Tie Snake,” now in the permanent collection of The Columbus Museum. 

Which part of the design process is your favorite? Which part is a challenge for you?

The most challenging part is deciding how to actually quilt a piece – how to quilt a top that I’ve pieced or appliquéd or otherwise constructed. I’d like to be more creative, in terms of design, than I am. I love my process, but to be honest, I would like to be able to take my work to a higher place design-wise. 

Do you prefer the kind of project that is challenging and requires attention, or the kind where you get in your meditative zone and enjoy the process?

I enjoy all of it. 

Is there an overarching theme that connects all of your work?

I see almost all of my work as celebratory. 

Only a couple of times have I made a “solemn” quilt. One would be my “Genocide at Horseshoe Bend,” currently touring as a part of a SAQA global exhibit. Virtually all my other work is celebratory.

With my map quilts I’m celebrating the beauty of the Southern landscape, with my narrative pieces I’m celebrating story-telling. With my outer space quilts I’m celebrating the vastness and wonder of whatever the hell it is that’s out there. 

I’m also very interested in how the smallest objects we humans know of – for instance, microscopic images of molecules and so forth – look so similar to the largest objects we humans know of – planets, for instance.  

I recently realized that with my map quilts I’m looking down from above, and with my outer space quilts I’m looking up from below. And I think that’s funny. Speaking of funny, I see many of my quilts, especially the narrative pieces, as humorous. I’m not sure that everybody else sees the humor in them.  

What’s the best piece of advice you’ve received?

I once read a quote from another quilter – I don’t remember her name, but she was an accomplished quilter. She was responding to the question of how to have confidence, how to get over the fear of getting started. The accomplished quilter responded that you just have to start by cutting into the cloth. “It’s just cloth,” she said. “It’s not human flesh.”  That has helped me. 

When I’m hesitant, often I just start cutting and I quickly get to a place that feels right.  Now that I type that, I guess it’s a form of improvisation. 

How has your creativity evolved over the years? What triggered the evolution to new media/kinds of work/ways of working?

There was a point in my evolution that was a very big deal for me. For about the first 30 years of my quilting life I was making traditional quilts – bed quilts using traditional patterns and fabrics.

At some point during that time I began to see in books and magazines images of new “art quilts” that were showing up out there – works by Flavin Glover, Michael James, Amish quilts – and I began to want to break free of what I saw as the confines of traditional quilting.

With no real art background, though, I was having a very difficult time doing that.  Along comes my daughter, Coulter Fussell, now a much more accomplished fiber artist than I’ll ever be. 

Coulter had always been an art kid – drawing and painting her way through her childhood and a Bachelor’s degree in art. She had never exhibited much interest in my sewing, though. She now admits that she shied away from sewing because she saw it as too “girly.” 

One weekend when she came home from college for a visit, she approached me and asked, “Mama, if I pull out some of your scraps and cut them into pieces and lay them out, will you sew them into a quilt?” 

What she was wanting to do, obviously, was to paint with fabric. I was thrilled to be asked, and we immediately set about that first Cathy/Coulter collaboration. It was, as far as I’m concerned, a success. We turned right around over the next few months and made two more collaborations. I still consider them among the very best work I’ve ever been involved in.

I had very little to do with the design but everything to do with the execution. It was the impetus I needed to launch out on my own with creative design work.

I think that Coulter and I would probably produce more collaborative pieces had we lived closer to each other, but she’s out in Mississippi and I’m in Georgia, so collaboration is difficult. Of course, we still sometimes ask each other for input, advice, or share materials. We no longer sit down together, design and make a quilt.

Coulter gave me the freedom to do what I wanted to do, and I’ll be forever grateful to her for that. 

Does your creative work come easily or do you struggle with your ideas? What obstacles (if any) do you experience when you are creating? If you do face obstacles, how do you get past them?

Oh, I’m forever in a struggle to try to take my work “to the next level.” That’s part of the fun.

I’m never really bummed about anything having to do with my quilting. I don’t love everything I make. I don’t think that everything I make is great or even good, but I sincerely enjoy the process.  And I very, very seldom completely give up on a piece. 

Where can people see your work?

I have works in several public institutions: two pieces in the Fulton County Public Arts collection in  Atlanta, six pieces in the David Koch Memorial Sloan Kettering Hospital collection in New York City, two pieces in the Alabama Department of Archives and History in Montgomery, and two pieces in the Columbus Museum here in Columbus, Georgia. 

I have pieces in various shows from time to time, and several times a year I have one-person shows here and there, mostly in the South. And, I love to open my studio for visits, by appointment. Y’all come!

My website:  cathyfussellquilts.com
Facebook:  Cathy Fussell
Instagram: @cathyfussell