Heidi Parkes’s grandmother planned a collaborative quilt to commemorate her birth—an intimate first introduction to the art of quilting. Continuing this family tradition, Parkes’s artistic practice incorporates textiles from the domestic realm, family heirlooms, and found fabric. She also integrates embroidered, stained, dyed, or designed fabric throughout, adding hand stitching that acts like an overlay of drawing on the quilt’s surface and reinforcing the slow, intentional process of construction.
Parkes’s quilts rarely adhere to a set plan, relying instead on intuition and improvisation. Influenced by abstract artists like Mark Rothko, Cy Twombly, Agnes Martin, and El Anatsui, she begins each quilt with a feeling, place, or theme. Pulling from aerial views, photographs, or objects, Parkes then reconstructs her world, working from multiple viewpoints and points in time. The result is a collaged layering of material and meaning—an inner dialogue made visible.
Milwaukee-based, Parkes holds a BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
