Category: Sarah Nishiura

New Quilts by Sarah Nishiura: After England, Inspiration Comes From Home

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November 8, 2019Textiles Sarah Nishiura

New quilts by Sarah Nishiura in our shop ->

“I’ll be working on the quilt designs while I’m here. They may have a lot of gray in them if the weather has any influence,” Sarah Nishiura wrote tongue-in-cheek from Liverpool in England, where she and her family were spending this past summer. So when the finished quilts arrived this fall, I was so excited to see what England had inspired in Sarah.

Sarah said that one of the quilts was inspired by knots and woven lines that has been a longtime interest of hers. I immediately thought of the ornamentations depicting knots that can be found in many old church architectures in English and Anglo-Saxon Stone carvings.

My husband (a British born Chinese from Exeter in deepest, darkest Devon who goes through life dripping with sarcasm) saw it and happily exclaimed “it’s so green like England!”

The green, though, was not by any English horticultural influence, but from a stripy linen pillow in Sarah’s living room in Chicago, which is one of her favorites. She feels that its colors shout out the “1960s”.

The other quilt, Sarah said, was inspired by her two cats, April and Lucca. The browns were inspired by April’s pretty fur, and the pink by Lucca’s cute pink nose.

April and Lucca, aka quilt models, on Sarah’s favorite pillow

Sarah said that she designed the quilts when she was traveling in England, but did not settle on the colors until she got home. She said that maybe it was the feeling of being happy to be back at home that made her choose fabrics that are so reflective of her domestic environment.

I often want to write about my travels because I have the opportunity to visit foreign places quite often. But writing about such experiences is so difficult because it involves expressing a vast range of emotions and experiences. It is amazing that artists like Sarah can convey so much of her feelings and observations directly and elegantly through her work. And in these quilts, she makes a very telling point, that the best journey takes you home.

New Quilt by Sarah Nishiura: Inspired by Taisho Design

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Ai Kanazawa

October 19, 2018Textiles Sarah Nishiura

Quilts by Sarah Nishura in our shop->

How cultures and designs inspire beyond time and borders is fascinating and eye-opening. Across the ages, early Greek artists were attracted by the ancient Egyptians, French impressionists were influenced by Japanese woodblock prints, and old Korean ceramics inspire today’s Japanese potters.

Sarah Nishiura’s quilt was inspired by a Taisho era kimono pattern

So I was intrigued to hear that Sarah Nishiura’s new quilt was inspired by a Taisho era kimono, with its bold and also slightly nostalgic pattern. Sarah says that she is really interested in the scale of the designs in the Taisho era kimono and the way its [large] scale allows the whole garment to come alive with the movement of the body. A quilt is much more like a kimono than a painting from the perspective that they twist and roll as they cover the body.

Quilt by Sarah Nishiura. A quilt is much more like a kimono than a painting, because it twists and rolls as it covers a surface

The designs from the Taisho era are eclectic mixtures of traditional Japanese designs with influences from contemporaneous Western design schools like Art Deco. Taisho was a unique time when Western and Japanese designs influenced each other simultaneously. And fortunately, because Japanese do not throw away kimono easily (mottainai), many examples of the patterns from the Taisho era are still easy to find.

Taisho era kimono with a large scale “Yabane” arrow feather pattern from my closet. This kimono belonged to my grandmother and is paper thin now, but I still wear it as “jyuban” -inner wear- for my kimono.

To provide a little background, Taisho (1912-1926) was a short era right after the better known Meiji (1868-1912) and just before Showa (1926-1989). Taisho was a time when liberalism flourished, popular culture was spread by mass media, café culture blossomed, and the new world opened for women to work and declare financial and spiritual independence. It is the equivalent of the “Roaring Twenties” in the West.

And the Taisho era continues to influence people today. If you ask a Japanese what comes to mind when they think of the Taisho era, they would probably say “Taisho Modern”.

Tokyo Station on the Marunouchi side. Originally opened in 1914, the station is a well-known and iconic brick structure from the Taisho era. The facade was restored to its original outlook in 2012.
Photo by J. Evans

The term “Taisho Modern”, or also called “Taisho Roman”, refers to spaces and designs that conjure up the culture of Taisho. I think of strikingly patterned kimono, cafes with high ceilings and stained glass windows, and old Japanese-Western style architecture that can still be seen in the high-end Ginza and Nihombashi districts of Tokyo

My great-grandparents, my grandparents, and my mother. Meiji, Taisho, and Showa eras on display in one photograph. My parents always talk about the generations who survived the Taisho era as tough and brave.

Most important, “Taisho Modern” carries an inherent feeling of resilience because Japan survived the Great Kanto Earthquake (1923) during Taisho, which was the country’s worst-ever natural disaster in which more than 100,000 people lost their lives. My parents always talk about the generations of people who survived the Taisho era as tough and brave. So I feel that it is a perfect sentiment for a lovely quilt that stands up to use and protects us from the cold, and does it in great style.

The Fabrics of a Craft: Quiltmaker Sarah Nishiura

By:

Ai Kanazawa

July 26, 2017Design Textiles Sarah Nishiura

Quilts by Sarah Nishiura in our shop ->

When I first saw a photograph of an inventive quilt made by the Chicago-based quilter Sarah Nishiura, I thought I was looking at an abstract painting. The fascinating geometry, surprising lines, and the hues of colors enticed me to feel something completely new.

2017 Quilt by Sarah Nishiura.
Photo courtesy of Sarah Nishiura

Sarah, who is both an accomplished painter and dedicated quilt-maker, distinguishes between the two forms. “A painting is flat,” she observes, ”a quilt on the other hand is never flat. It may be presented that way in a gallery or in an image on-line, but the surface is textured from the stitches. There is always some kind of wave or wiggle to it, and, if it is used on a bed or a lap, it changes constantly as it is folded, draped, or left in a lump on a piece of furniture.”

quilt by sarah nishiura — A quilt changes constantly as it gets used in our everyday life

A quilt has much more purpose than a painting in Sarah’s view. “Quilts are meant to be touched while paintings are generally not. As a painter, the brush was always an intermediary between me and the thing I was making. When I quilt, I touch every inch of my work as it evolves. And similarly, touch is a very important part of the viewer/user’s experience,” she explained.

Sarah was taught to quilt by her mother, whose own mother made quilts by piecing together feed sacks during the Great Depression in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Sarah’s Japanese-American father’s family was held in an internment camp during the Second World War, where they gathered wood scraps to create altars for people.

Sarah hand-quilts all of her work instead of by machine because she likes the way the lines look. It is a slow process but she feels that the pace of quilting is what makes the final product so special.
Photo courtesy of Sarah Nishiura

By creating beautiful quilts that provide warmth through the piecing together of otherwise discarded fragments from the past, Sarah finds a connection to the ingenious creativity of her ancestors who created useful and beautiful things out of nothing.

Sarah Nishiura and her shelves of inspiration at her studio in Chicago
Photo courtesy of Sarah Nishiura

Sarah gets her greatest inspirations from quilt history. “I love looking at quilts made in the past, analyzing their designs, how they were made, and also thinking about the context in which they were made”. She occasionally takes a deep dive into the collections database of The International Quilt Study Center in Lincoln, Nebraska where traditional quilt patterns can be searched with examples of hundreds of variations of the same pattern.

“One thing I love to do when designing is to challenge the geometric relationships that have traditionally been used in quilting. Figuring out how to warp a grid or shift proportions within a composition is a really fun puzzle and can open up endless possibilities and create some really dazzling effects,” she said. Indeed, a quick Internet image search of Sarah’s name will pull up quilts with numerous innovative designs that she has created. Given Sarah’s gift and passion for geometry, it is no coincidence that her father was a mathematician.

Quilt designs by Sarah Nishiura. She loves figuring out how to warp a grid or shift proportions.
Photo courtesy of Sarah Nishiura

Yanagi Muneyoshi, the founder of the Mingei movement once wrote in an essay titled “Nature of Folk-Crafts” that the most essential quality of folk-craft is its nationality, because it directly reflects the life of that nation. When Sarah remarked that “a quilt is made of many different materials that all have to be made to play nice together”, this made me think about the openness and inclusiveness of quilts and how synonymous it is with America, where the quilting tradition thrives to the present day with more than 16 million quilt makers.

A quilt’s most special quality is its intimacy. “The desire to play with geometric pattern is only one part of the game” says Sarah Nishiura.

I understand why Sarah does not want her quilts high up on walls, but want you to keep it close and take them into your hands. It is because the most special quality of her beautiful work is in its humility and intimacy.