Spotlight: Cecilia Koppmann, Textile Artist

Once Cecilia Koppmann learned how to dye her own fabric, the world of textile art opened for her. She enjoys every part of the process creating her art – from dyeing fabric, to cutting and then the exploration of sewing all of the bits back together.

How did you get started designing textile art? Always an artist, or was there a “moment”?

I studied and worked as an interior designer, and always liked to make crafts. In 1998, I started doing patchwork almost by chance. My Chilean friend Patricia Perez Canto Caffrey taught me. I was so fascinated by the technique that combined mathematics, geometry, the possibility of combining colors and fabric textures, that I never stopped sewing…

Where do you find your inspiration for your designs?

It’s difficult for me to determine where inspiration comes from. Often, the material itself and the colors inspire me to begin. 

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

In general, I improvise and let myself be guided because I know that is the way in which the unconscious manifests itself.

What motivates you artistically?

Working in this way, I can say that some of my work is permeated by life circumstances that were often difficult.

I believe that quilting for me has always had a very important healing aspect. It rescued me during serious financial crises, helped me enormously to overcome cancer on two occasions, the death of beloved people, and how to build something beautiful out of painful situations.

Do you use a sketchbook or journal? How does that help your work develop?

In general, when I start a piece, I draw a very simple sketch or outline in which I describe with words the criteria I will use in geometry, color usage, certain sequences, etc… It’s much more of a verbal description than a drawing.

Once I start working, many times the work asks to go in a different direction from the initial sketch. I don’t follow that sketch as if it were a pattern. Rather, it’s like a triggering idea…

How does your studio organization contribute to your work process?

My workshop is in my house and I spend most of the day there. I live in Buenos Aires in a big French-style apartment that is over 100 years old. It has high ceilings and walls with moldings. In one of them, I set up a design wall about 15 feet wide x 12 feet high.

I believe that having that spaciousness invites me to work with large pieces. I also have a very large table where I cut and spread my dyed fabrics. I enjoy a clean and organized space very much, but it takes a lot of effort to maintain order since I am naturally disorganized! It’s very important for me to feel comfortable with my environment. A dark, gloomy, or very chaotic place affects me.

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

In terms of work, it’s not always easy to achieve the number of pieces I would like to complete in a year. I try to make as many quilts as possible.

I juggle to fit in the creation of quilts with travels to festivals where I teach, regular Zoom classes, seminars for different guilds, and the administrative and organizational tasks that all of this entails, while also combining the dedication I like to give to my family and friends.

 I work with only one piece at a time and do not interrupt my task or start another before finishing the first. 

Scraps. Saver? Or be done with them?

I don’t waste fabric (because it seems almost as serious as wasting food).

I’m aware that often I save scraps with the hope of using them later, and I know more and more certainly that that day will not come. That’s why, in recent years, when I finish a piece, instead of storing the scraps in a box, I sew them together in some way and often a new work emerges from that. I like to call these works COLLATERAL PROJECTS, making a wordplay with the SIDE EFFECTS of some medications.

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

[The detailed story about the “Rays and Sparks” project, which describes her quilting process during radiation treatment]

My work ‘Radiotherapy project” (Rayos y Centellas)  was a project I began at the start of radiation treatment after a breast cancer surgery. I had to undergo 37 radiation sessions daily from Monday to Friday, and during the first medical interview, I had to wait in the waiting room for 3 hours. 

I thought I would go crazy, but I had no escape. The treatment was mandatory. So I invented a kind of game with the following rules:

1. Each day, I would bring a different piece of fabric that I would embroider during the wait.
2. I would start by numbering that square with the session number and embroider in a circle from the inside out.
3. I would not start embroidering at home, nor finish the embroidery afterwards. I could only embroider while waiting to be called for radiation. 
4. I would post on my blog every morning what I did the day before. (That gave me the opportunity to find encouraging comments from many people.)

This would give me a kind of record of the daily waits. If I waited a long time, the embroidery would be dense, and if I waited a little, the embroidery would be sparse.

I prepared a small bag with buttons, findings, and embroidery threads.

At the end of the treatment, I made a quilt.  I found myself with 40 embroidered squares that I joined in 8 rows of 5 blocks representing the 5 days of the week during the 8 weeks the treatment lasted.

Although there were 37 sessions, there were 3 occasions when I was not given radiation for different reasons: skin irritation, national holiday, and a malfunction of the radiotherapy machine. So I ended up with 40 blocks.

I joined these blocks in a quilt. I used the trapunto technique and very dense quilting to represent a breast in each block, and when I finished, I was able to close a very bitter chapter in an artistic way that allowed me to go through the bad patch and turn the page.

What surprised me most was the joy with which I went each day to ’embroider’, leaving the treatment in the background.

Having started the project to calm anxiety while waiting, I found myself giving up my turn to other patients to embroider a little more. This is what I would call a wonderfully effective and ridiculous result.

Based on that radiotherapy project, when quarantine began, I started a very healing project that I shared on social media, which eventually brought together more than 650 quilters from around the world. If you’re interested, I can tell you more about this in our next interview. It was a beautiful project.

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

I enjoy all stages of developing a work. I love dyeing my own fabrics. And mostly work exclusively with them combined with silk.

Once I start sewing I especially like placing the improvised units on the design panel to begin working on the composition. What order to give it to achieve harmony, what colors or shapes I should add or remove to perfect the balance.

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

I believe what connects all my work is my passion for colors and therefore my use of self-dyed fabrics. The fabric dyeing process was actually one of the turning points in my work. In Argentina, we don’t have any patchwork fabric suppliers and online orders are not always possible.

When I started dyeing my own fabrics, that limitation ceased to exist and my works began to develop their own style. This became especially true when I started combining dyed cotton with silk, which allowed me to play with the interesting contrast between cotton’s opacity and silk’s luminosity.

Do you enter juried shows? Do you approach your work differently for these venues?

I have entered competitions many times. I really like being able to do so, but they become more difficult when I have to follow a specific theme. I prefer to work on themes that call me much more than following given guidelines.

Do you keep track of your work? Shows that you’ve entered? Tell us what works for you.

I keep a record of all my quilts with their measurements, year of execution, exhibitions they participated in, awards received, price, and whether or not they were sold. I also keep a record of the Festivals where I teach and the publications in which my work has been published.

Where can people see your work?

My pieces are published on my website chronologically and organized by categories: www.ceciliakoppmann.com. I also publish on Instagram and Facebook, but I acknowledge that while I publish part of my activity on social networks, I find it difficult to do so regularly due to the time it involves. I prefer to use that time to develop new classes and create new pieces.

Additional Statement:

I believe my strength lies in color, teaching different techniques, and above all, the joy my students bring me, with whom I create a lovely COMMUNITY.

Interview published January 2025