Spotlight: Sheryl St. Germain, Poet, Essayist and Fiber Artist

Sheryl St. Germain discovered fiber art as a way to do something tactile to complement her writing. She works improvisationally, making works in response to her writing, using a variety of surface design techniques to create her one-of-a-kind textiles.

Why art quilts? How did you get started?

I spent my life as a poet and essayist, teaching and directing an MFA program in Creative Writing for 15 years and publishing several books. 

When my son died of a drug overdose some years ago, I wrote two books about addiction, my own healing and recovery, and his death. After that, a part of me felt like I couldn’t go back to creating with words, at least for a time. 

Every time I picked up a pen, words about my lost son came out. I felt that I needed to get out of my head, to work in a more physical, visceral way. I needed to use my hands.

I had a colleague and friend who had also lost her son tragically and I’d watched as she took up quilt-making to express her love and grief for her son’s lost life. I thought I might be able to do the same, and I hoped that throwing myself into a new art might also help with my own journey of healing. 

The physicality of making a quilt appealed to me, the cutting, the piecing, the stitching. I took early retirement, bought a sewing machine, and started quilting. I began with traditional quilting to learn technique, then moved to working without patterns, improvisational piecing, designing my own quilts.  I soon tired of commercial cloth, so I started dyeing and printing my own cloth.  

I have come to think of art quilts as poems in cloth. Bits of fabric, like words, are sewn together to make something whole. I’m drawn to abstraction because that seems to have an effect most like a poem, a kind of seductive ambiguity, rather than a clearcut narrative.  

When was the first time you realized you are a creative person?

I wrote poems almost as soon as I could write a sentence, and I was always interested in fiber arts, learning to sew and crochet at an early age as well. I loved the arts and literature, and got my graduate degrees in Humanities. 

It wasn’t until I started college that I realized I could actually spend my life as a creative writer, as long as I didn’t mind teaching to earn a living.

It’s never been about making money for me; making art, whether it’s poetry or stitched fabric, it’s spiritual practice. 

How does your writing and poetry influence your fiber art?

Almost everything I learned about writing and thinking about poems I was able to bring to my art quilts. 

Questions of rhythm, how to balance imagery and movement in a line, music and lyricism all relate to the kinds of stitched art that I make.

As a poet and teacher of poetry, I also learned how to create a professional persona and share my knowledge with others, something I’ve continued to do with textile art.

What different creative media do you use in your art quilts?

I am primarily interested in surface design. I use cotton, linen, and sometimes silk for my fabrics. 

Sometimes I machine quilt, but more often I hand-stitch with hand-dyed threads, as I like the physical connection to the cloth and thread. 

I most often use Procion MX fabric dyes, but I also sometimes use earth minerals and soy milk to color fabric, depending on the effect I want. 

I also sometimes use acrylic paints. I use screen printing and stencils made from paper, tape, and plastic to create texture and imagery. I also use needle-nose bottles to write on the fabric.

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

Definitely an improviser.  Planning reminds me too much of making an outline, which I’ve always disliked. 

I want to allow the intelligence of the cloth and its interaction with dye and stitch to inspire me. I’m looking for an organic process.

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

Hard to say. I always want to finish, but at a certain point, you sometimes have to say that the hopes you had for a particular piece are just not panning out. You either abandon it or cut it up and repurpose it for another work. In any case, I almost always learn something from a failed piece.

Describe your creative space.

I have a studio that we built specifically for my projects, a separate building in our back yard.  It’s a wet and dry studio. 

One side has a large sink and shelves with all my dyes and chemicals for dyeing. The other side houses my sewing machine and wall of threads. 

My design wall, where I can put up ideas and build up my pieces, runs along the back wall of the studio.

In the middle of the studio is a large table I built on top of many drawers that hold fabric. The table functions as a space for cutting fabric but also as a print and dyeing table. 

I have extra tables outside that I also use for dyeing and printing fabric. Photographs of my grandmother, my son, and an inspiring friend are on the walls, as well as quotes from artists and writers I love. 

The wall on the dyeing side is papered with chemical recipes for various dyeing processes. I have a large bookcase next to the sewing machine with books about techniques, and notebooks from workshops I have taken (from Claire Benn, Carol Soderlund, Nancy Crow, and Pat Pauly to mention just a few) as well as my own sketchbooks and dyeing notebooks.

There’s also a section for the surface design classes I am now sometimes teaching to my guilds.

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

Usually there’s something I’ve been thinking about; it could be my garden or some other element from the natural world, or something personal or cultural. 

I’m from New Orleans and love Voodoo Dolls, which I collect.  I made several quilts that are sort of odes to my garden in Savannah, where I now live, and some to voodoo dolls.  Sometimes I’m thinking about writing and how to make marks on fabric that evoke writing but don’t “read” as writing.  Sometimes it’s something I feel strongly about, either positively or negatively.  

In a  recent quilt, which I call “What Becomes of the Broken Hearted” (after the Jimmy Ruffin song), I was thinking of grief and how the marks of our hurts and healings never leave us.  I used linen and cotton to piece together a large, lopsided heart, leaving some of the edges frayed and using large hand stitches to evoke the mending of a heart. I added a long red silk piece to echo the passion and intensity of that which is broken in us. Since this is part of my current Reliquary project that I discuss below and which includes poems alongside the art, I wrote this poem to accompany the piece:  

That song from my years of becoming someone,
a melancholic maze of music and words that still
somehow comforts. I didn’t know then what
I know now, that when your heart breaks
you have to stitch it together with
whatever you have–it doesn’t matter
if it looks nice, clean. You stitch quickly
to staunch the blood, not caring
that everyone can see the tangled
mess that stitched-up heart is.

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

I love dyeing, coloring and printing fabric. I love the improvisatory aspect of making the fabric and then deciding if I will use it “wholecloth”or cut it up and piece it. 

I don’t like the machine quilting part, which is why, I suppose, I do so little of it.  I don’t like that a machine comes between my hands and the fabric (and to be truthful I’m also not so good at making straight lines with the machine!)

I don’t like the perfection that you often see with quilts that are machine quilted. Sylvia Plath: “Perfection is terrible. It cannot have children.” 

I want someone to look at my work and see that a person made it, not a machine. I see my stitching as my individual hand, my voice. It shouldn’t look like a machine or anyone else’s stitching.

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

I’ve worked to incorporate writing into my quilts, often a kind of asemic writing where the words exist primarily as marks. 

Although I work in abstraction, I also aim for my pieces to have an emotional resonance. At some point, I’m always thinking about some sensation I want the piece to evoke. 

With some exceptions, I love vibrant, unusual colors and color combinations, which probably comes from my having been born and spent most of the first half of my life in New Orleans. 

There is a jazzy, rhythmic feel to my work. My imagery is big, gestural; I rarely work with tiny pieces.

Is your work more content-driven or process-driven? Does an idea inspire a work of art, or do the materials launch an idea?

I very much enjoy the process, and it sometimes happens that while experimenting with a new surface design technique I discover something that might be the beginning of a new piece. 

It’s often shapes, colors, or lines that I see either in the natural world or in another art piece that inspires me. 

Having said that, my large projects often have some kind of “content” behind them; I have a set of quilts inspired by poetry, one by addiction and recovery, one by personal relics, and another by bookcases, for example. At the end of the day I want there to be something beyond process, much as I enjoy it. 

Does your work have stories to tell?

Often, yes. The current project I’m working on, “Reliquary” has many stories to tell. 

The project is based on a collection of objects I have kept over the years that have deep significance for me, my recovery chips, my son’s recovery chip, an osteoderm from an alligator given to me by a dear friend, Mardi Gras beads, voodoo dolls, broken bits of things, my journal and my mother’s journal, for example. 

For this project, I first write a poem inspired by the piece, and then I begin to build some kind of stitched fabric (not always a quilt) that evokes the shape of the object, its color, or some other physical element. Eventually, they will both appear in a book, with poems on one side, and stitched work on the opposing page. I hope to have an exhibition as well. Each piece tells the story of why this object has meaning for me. I like the idea of making a book because it allows you to develop a kind of narrative, and a book lasts longer than an exhibition.

What piece of work makes you most proud? Why? 

A piece that I made last year, “A Mother Who Loves Books,” is one of my favorites right now.  My mother, who loved books, had recently died. I spent a long time exploring making a color for the linen cloth that the piece would be built on that would evoke the color of the pages of an old book. I used a needle nose bottle to copy parts of a poem about her on the cloth and inserted a long pleat to echo the pages of the book.  

My first memory is that of my mother’s voice reading me a book. I’m certain that I became a poet because of my mother sharing her love of books with me. And yet despite my great love for her, some of the deepest wounds I carry are from disagreements we had. This is why, although I hope this piece offers an homage to that love, it also suggests difficulty; it’s why one side is black and part of the linen is left ragged. 

The writing on the quilt is from a poem I wrote called “My Mother’s Perfume,” from Let it Be A Dark Roux, published by Autumn House Books. The last stanza perhaps best expresses what I want this piece to suggest:

I am swollen with her, the whole orchestra
of her tortured wifehood, her gorgeous
ambiguity entering me like a drug
until I sleep and dream of another life.

I also am very partial to an earth pigment-colored piece I made called “Recovery.” It was the first piece of mine to be juried into an international exhibition (see below for info). I wanted the piece to suggest the movement from addiction (darkness)  to recovery. The rune-like characters hand-sewn on the right side of the fabric have the letters from the word “recovery” hidden in them.

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

Not really advice, but something I think about all the time. The Chilean poet Pablo Neruda wrote “… poetry is like bread; it should be shared by all, by scholars and by peasants, by all our vast, incredible, extraordinary family of humanity.”  I believe this to be true of all art, and I aim for my art quilts to be as filling and necessary as bread.

Where can people see your work?

For the next three years “A Mother Who Loves Books” is travelling with a Sacred Threads exhibition in various venues in the United  States. 2025 travel schedule is here. “Recovery” is traveling for the next two years internationally in a SAQA Minimalism exhibit.  

See my website for more of my work. 

Interview posted November 2024