The Fine Art of Rochester Area Fiber Artists
The Gallery at the Arts & Cultural Council
By Sarah E. Lentini

“In traditional quilt groups, I felt like the odd man out,” says Julie Brandon. She is an office manager, a web master, a certified public accountant, and a self-taught artist, whose enormous creativity, discovered late in life, has been nurtured and showcased through her participation in the Rochester Area Fiber Artists (RAFA). Julie Brandon and Barbara Seils, both from RAFA, are sitting and talking with me about the group’s history and their upcoming show.

Over the past ten years, RAFA has evolved from a subgroup of the Genesee Valley Quilt Club to a separate, complementary organization that brings together approximately 50 artists from all the fiber arts: quilters, weavers, dyers, fiber sculptors, and designers of wearable art. The group meets from 9 am to noon on the first Thursday of every month for an “incredible exchange of ideas,” according to Brandon and Seils. Each meeting serves up training and information on a variety of topics, along with opportunities for networking.

Julie Brandon, currently in a volunteer leadership role with RAFA, is particularly interested in the human face. She loves to experiment in both two and three dimensions, working in glass and ceramics in addition to making quilts and fiber dolls, and says of herself, “I have a Ph.D. in craftiness.”

Putting her considerable technical skills to use, Brandon tells me that she starts her creative process by articulating concept ideas as graphic designs on a computer, then executing the refined blueprint manually in painstakingly detailed threadwork.

With considerable talents that she didn’t discover in herself until she was in her early 30s, Brandon talks about the folly of juxtaposing the arts and the sciences as if they were at opposite ends of the educational spectrum. She pauses for a moment, perhaps for emphasis, and says, “Creativity is very logical. It’s a shame that we compartmentalize people.”

Barbara Seils, also serving in a volunteer leadership capacity for RAFA, agrees. A former industrial engineer and project planner who worked for Eastman Kodak Company for 17 years, Seils is an experienced and accomplished quilter, who dyes her own fabrics and long ago abandoned pre-existing patterns, wanting instead “to find art within myself.” Her work is abstract. She tells me that she is drawn to a “strong line element” with “broad, gutsy, bold shapes.”

Seils talks of artists that have influenced and gotten her involved with both local and national fiber arts movements – Marcia DeCamp, Nancy Crow – and I realize that Seils and Brandon and RAFA represent a very different approach to the fiber arts than what the layperson might expect: a progressive, cutting-edge usage of the fiber arts as a fine art, as a medium for the exploration and expression of truth and beauty.

Indeed, in addition to contributing to the preservation of high-quality traditional crafts, RAFA may well be important nationwide in its pursuit of the fiber arts as a vehicle for the creation of fine art,

RAFA’s exquisite and highly sophisticated work is on display at The Gallery at the Arts & Cultural Council this January. See details below.