Artist Statement: I consider myself a fiber art adventurer, experimenting and exploring the tactility, richness, flexibility, dimension, and intimacy of textiles. I began sewing at my mother’s knee and was taught by example the love of fabric.  Although you can see sewing and quilting roots in my work, I quickly moved through traditional quilting and on to fiber art, or textiles that removed themselves and their functionality from the bed and struck out with certainty to join art on the wall.

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I am inspired by the world I inhabit and my perception of it.  I am just as likely to be captured by the shape and pattern of cracks in asphalt as I am by the glory of nature. People do think I am a bit nuts photographing a parking lot on my hands and knees, and maybe they are right. But I carry on, capturing the beauty or whimsy I see and translating it to fabric.  I completely lose myself while manipulating fabric by adding color, taking color away, molding it to create shapes, and by adding texture through thread and raw edges. There is a kind of alchemy in taking a two dimensional medium and moving it out, away from the wall, in transforming the fabric surface, in adding stitched texture to enhance the richness or depth of a design, in choosing to not clip strings or adding yet more dangling threads, and in leaving edges raw and letting them—even encouraging them—to ravel. 

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Cloth is such a personal and intimate thing; it covers us day and night. And maybe because fabric is so comforting and warm against our skin, textile art is the perfect medium to invite, perhaps even compel, a stolen touch. And that, too, is part of the medium’s magic. If I could be granted one art wish, it would be that everyone who sees my work would be allowed to touch it, for I think that intimacy would surely connect us. We as humans are born to touch—the world around us and each other.

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Artist Biography: Rosanna Lynne Welter has roots in traditional quilting but quickly transitioned to textile art once she began exploring the exciting processes and techniques advancing the fiber arts movement. Just as she was emerging in the field, “life” put art on extended pause as she cared for elderly parents and earned a living. Eventually the long drought ended, the floodgates reopened, and her art began flowing again in 2018, moving her down an exciting new path. As a self-taught artist, her work is filled with naivety, dimension, whimsy, texture, and lots of thread. In 2019, Rosanna began exhibiting again and has competed and shown work locally, regionally, and nationally/internationally. Rosanna’s work is in private collections and has been published in multiple books. Her early works were exhibited at Quilt National, International Quilt Expo in Innsbruck Austria, and the Musée des Tissue in Lyon France. She is also a past recipient of a Utah Arts Council/NEA Individual Artist Grant.

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Currently, Rosanna is a member of 4 Common Corners, an invitational fiber group of artists located in Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah(4commoncorners.com), and Studio Art Quilt Associates (SAQA.com) where she served on the CO/UT/ WY Regional Exhibition Committee. Locally, she served as Exhibitions Chair for the Utah Surface Design Group and now serves as Treasurer. Rosanna, an Idaho native living in Utah, is currently focused on her daily art practice at her in-home studio in West Valley, Utah where she lives with her husband, 3 rescue dogs, and a rescue kitty.

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Rosanna Lynne Welter 

rosannalynnewelter.org

@rosannalynnewelter

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