Remember being in Grade 1, and opening your first box of pencil crayons? Oh! which color to choose first? I never want to forget that moment! So says St. Albert artist Shirley Cordes-Rogozinsky.

Her enthusiasm for creating with colour has never waned. She is still just as excited about the colour choices for her abstract oil paintings as she was as a child with her box of crayons. Her creativity has matured and the depth of feeling invoked by her themed abstracts is compelling. As her audience, we sense her excitement and we feel the energy. Cordes-Rogozinsky recently came across the work of fabric artist Margo Fiddes and was struck by the wonderful organic nature of her quilts. She was sure that she had found a kindred spirit and the feeling that they should exhibit together was overpowering. Shirley did not ignore those feelings, and the result is a collaborative showing of their work in April at St. Albert’s Art Beat Gallery.

Emerging artist Margo Fiddes creates quilted artworks that simultaneously defy and celebrate the word “quilt.” From a distance, a delicate blade of lily of the valley in sharp detail strikes a pose against a darkened, blurred backdrop.  Upon closer inspection, however, there’s something a little different about this artwork. Her medium is fabric and her “brush” a sewing machine. She controls the extent of abstraction in her pieces through the placement of seam lines and the selection and arrangement of the prints and pattern of the fabrics themselves. Margo’s mastery of the quilt medium makes her work unique from other contemporary landscape and nature quilt artists.

The title of their joint exhibit, “From the Ground Up,” reflects the theme of the work — growing things — but is also relevant to the process of their creativity. Both artists start with a basic substrate and proceed to layer material onto it until the moment the work reaches its climax of completion. •