Sue’s first explorations of quilting involved square grids, with symmetrical patterns composed from solid-color fabrics, much in the manner of the Amish quilting traditions she admired. Her designs, however, were never taken from traditional Amish patterns, but were original compositions worked out in advance using graph paper and colored pencils.
Early on she discovered the efficiency of sewing unit-width fabric strips together, then cutting the strips crosswise to speed the assembly of the required blocks. The margins of her notebooks are filled with calculations related to this technique, which she continued to employ to great creative effect throughout her quilting career.
Beginning with a commission for a compass rose in 1987, Dey began to push the limits of what was achievable with her graph paper method, generating a series of quilted stars and geometric bursts that required carefully aligned cutting and piecing on narrow diagonals across the rectilinear grids of her design. Her output included Amish-inspired 8-point stars, a tricky seven-point, the sixteen-point compass rose (a gift for a sea captain), and in a rare departure, print fabrics incorporated into a luxurious twenty-point star inlaid in a circle.
Seeking to express more varied effects of color and light than she could achieve using solid color or print pattern fabrics, Sue Dey began experimenting with hand-colored cloth in the 1980s, at first airbrushed with narrow stripe patterns, and later hand-dyed using a variety of techniques including wet-on-wet, tie dye, and resist dyeing.
The hand-dyed sections brought a new organic rhythm to her quilts, playing off against the traditional square grids and creating interesting textural and spatial variation. Incorporating the new varicolored fabrics into her strip and slice construction methods gave her the freedom to rearrange sections by color, creating rippling junctures and gradations reminiscent of—and often in open tribute to—Impressionist painters like Claude Monet. She dyed the quilt backs as well, preserving the natural and random variations in whole and uncut form.
Marin Sunrise II (reverse)
Flood/Half Life (detail of reverse)
The artist’s series of quilted meditations on water and fire from 1992-93 show a sharpened command of dyeing technique and a response to the focus provided by a defined subject. No longer merely exploratory, her process of coloring, cutting, arranging, and piecing becomes an original means to an envisioned end, and something of a signature style. With the confident adoption of a workflow enabling structural improvisation within the work, these quilts cover an array of dyeing and piecing methods that pay fitting tribute to the elemental and fluid nature of their subjects.
SF Quilters Guild 1992 Judges’ Choice Award
Throughout Suzanne Dey’s quilting career, geometrical patterns remained a touchstone. Amidst her improvisatory and hand-colored quilts, she continued to work from sketchbook grids, advancing the sophistication of her geometrical approach by adapting ideas from M.C. Escher, Penrose tiling, and fractal geometry into her work.
In these later geometric quilts, bias cuts and contrasting colors combine with sophisticated control of hue and value to create 3-dimensional push/pull illusions and suggestions of sliding layers. In some works she enhanced these dimensional effects with high-sheen fabrics, giving an almost metallic effect.
As well as her large wall-sized hangings and bed quilts, her later geometric work also includes smaller-scale crib quilts and throws, and she produced both commissioned and charitable work for wedding gifts, baby showers, auctions, and social causes in addition to her exhibition quilts.
Suzanne Dey’s investigation of color, movement, and dimensionality took another original turn with her series of pierced and pleated art quilts beginning in the 1990s. Applying her command of hue and contrast, these works focus directly on the question of evoking three dimensional forms on a flat surface, their wavelike projecting pleats changing in appearance and perspective as the viewer passes in front of the work. Here we see once again an altogether novel approach, in pieces that provide a satisfying new perspective on the artist’s long examination of spatial, chromatic, and structural issues within her work, and a Zen-like distillation of her earlier water tributes.
Working out of her home, first in San Francisco and then in Marin County to the north, Sue loved to surround herself with the colors, materials, and objet’s d’art that inspired her. Her home was always filled with the evidence of her active creative process, a process that inevitably took place under the watchful eye of one or more beloved feline companions.