Kim Eichler-Messmer doesn’t mimic the natural world so much as interpret it. Her large-scale art quilts function as abstracted landscapes, capturing a region’s mood, memory, or “the feeling of the sky.”
Eichler-Messmer, who has spent much of her life in Iowa and Kansas, draws inspiration from the rural Midwest, where one can still find dramatic skyscapes unbroken by power lines or other man-made structures. In her care, these vistas are anything but staid. The artist replaces the energy of architectural forms—the angular gashes of suspension bridges, the jutting caps of skyscrapers—with stitching clean as pencil strokes, asymmetric piecing, and almost graph-like design elements.
Color is most important in evoking the Midwest’s changing seasons, erratic weather, and peculiar quality of light. Eichler-Messmer, an expressive colorist, captures the variegated shades of rural skies by hand-painting her fabrics with dye in a process not unlike watercolor. In Sky.MN.Aug, aquatic-toned greens and blues bloom on the cotton fabric, feathering into soft curves and sherbet striations. The brush strokes are hazy, meditative. But in the quilt’s bottom half, the sunset streaks stiffen and crack like ice: immersion-dyed triangles create a solid-color seismic disturbance, pulling us back down to earth.
The quilts’ scenes are more visceral than intellectual. Although the artist often begins her explorations with a photograph, she relies on her emotional memory of a place—in all its rearview-heightened vibrancy—to guide her hand. “I never really know what it’s going to look like until I see the whole thing,” she says. Surprise and improvisation are crucial to the process.
Her cutting and piecing are likewise improvisational. In some quilts, such as Sky(reflection).KS.July, she brushes dye onto a single piece of cloth in watercolor currents before cutting it apart and reassembling the pieces. She describes the kaleidoscopic process of fragmenting, remixing, and reassembling as akin to collage. The result is a mosaic of movement, a memory shattered and reconfigured into something new. A swath of inky black at the bottom of the quilt defines the horizon in stark silhouette; a sense of angular momentum, propelled through sunny yellow triangles, evokes sunlight breaking through a brooding thunderhead.
For Eichler-Messmer, organic forms and geometric shapes are complements, not contradictions. Fields.MO.July unite the two in a subtle rendering of a dusty sky and sun-goldened field. Although the image appears placid at first glance, a close inspection reveals a dizzying energy in the lines, veering and converging with mechanical momentum. Eichler-Messmer’s kinetic stitching creeps unpredictably across the field like a computer game of Snake.
In all of Eichler-Messmer’s quilts, there’s more than first meets the eye—more texture, more movement, more complexity. Her ability to marry organic imperfection and geometric crispness, hand-painted variation and immersion-dyed consistency, seems central not only to her process, but to her vision of the Midwest itself.
The Midwestern landscape is anything but plain, her quilts seem to say. It’s as dynamic as the mind that encounters it.
– Liz Cook