Nature’s Wisdom in Art

We’re excited to share that one of the Lebanon Times’ beloved writers, Cindy Heath, has a fantastic art show on display at the Kilton Library in West Lebanon through March. Cindy is a talented artist and writer who cares deeply about the environment, evident in her work with local gardens and as a member of Sustainable Lebanon, and in her constant advocacy for protecting and respecting the nature around us.

Cindy’s hand-dyed and screen-printed silk panels, representing the colors on the color wheel.

Her quilted art exhibit, titled “Nature’s Wisdom”, features vibrant and evocative depictions of various elements of nature that are important to Cindy, and that she hopes will inspire others who view her artwork to consider their relationship with the natural world.

“I’ve always been an environmentalist and drawn to nature themes,” she says, explaining that this exhibit is “intended to represent the fact that we can learn so much from nature.”

Cindy employs biomimicry (nature inspired designs) to demonstrate this in her quilted artwork. One piece, “A Gift From the Sun”, depicts pieces of a Sun in fiery yellows and oranges and deep, mysterious reds moving across the fabric canvas confined by a quilted frame. “That piece says a lot to me about how everything on Earth and in life starts with the Sun; we need it to live.” Another of Cindy’s favorites, “Night Forest”, shows “dark skies” and a “raspberry-colored moon” above a shadowy forest of trees in grays and blacks.

“Night Forest”

Cindy started making quilts as a child, learning from her mother how to work a sewing machine and sew her own clothes. In the early ’80s, Cindy rediscovered quilting and sewing in a new light through art quilting, a method of merging art with traditional quilting. “Quilters who had been working in textiles making full bed quilts with patterns started to shift to freelance designing quilts and wall hangings,” Cindy says.

Adapting to this new trend, Cindy started taking classes with professional art quilters who taught her different styles and techniques to incorporate into her own work. “I gradually began to learn mixed media and how to dye my own cloth,” she says. “Other pieces contain some of the cloth that I’ve dyed, but there’s also commercial cloth [and] there’s textiles that I get at thrift stores or people give me.”

“Night Forest”

Colors have since fascinated Cindy, and she tries to feature every color of the 12-color colorwheel in her art – a theme she’s been working on for a few years. “When I do a series, I try to think about what it might look like in all the different colors of the color wheel and variations of those colors,” she says. Hand-dying her own cloth helps achieve that goal. One part of this exhibit, a series of panels of silk cloth – represent “the sky and air and movement, energy,” she says, using a screenprinting technique to layer different designs onto fabric that she previously dyed. “You’ll see if you look closely…I had several shades of screenprinting, so it went from white, to gray, to black, so that there’s different variations of white in it.”

“Some pieces take a few days once I get the idea,” Cindy says, but a piece as big and intricate as her colored panels takes around a year to complete, needing time to dye her fabrics to just the right shade before adding their finishing touches.

Cindy’s art show will close with a reception on March 20th (fittingly, the spring equinox), from 6-8 pm at the Kilton Library in West Lebanon.

“I hope people take the time to read the descriptions next to some of the pieces about how nature is operating in the world,” she says, “and how nature can help us with our [own] designs and systems.”