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Deidre Scherer's Workroom
Deidre's Life Story
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DEIDRE SCHERER'S LIFE STORY
Meet
Deidre Scherer, author of Deidre Scherer: Work in Fabric & Thread and
the featured artist in Threads of Experience!
Deidre Scherer is a textile artist renowned for her intimate images of ageing. She uses piecing, layering, and machine-sewing techniques to create portraits so realistic you'd almost expect them to move and talk.
Her work graces the covers of several books, including When I Am an Old Woman I Shall Wear Purple, a bestselling collection of poems edited by Sandra Haldeman Martz. Deidre again collaborated with Sandra to produce Threads of Experience (Papier Mache Press, 1996), which pairs 20 of Deidre's fabric-and-thread paintings with American poetry. Deidre's most recent book, Deidre Scherer: Work in Fabric & Thread (C&T Publishing, 1998), is a compelling narrative of her art and its influences.
Deidre began drawing before she learned to talk. She gave her first solo exhibition in kindergarten, when the school principal hung her work on the office walls. "By age sixteen," she writes, "I was bartering with my orthodontist: an oil painting in exchange for several payments on my braces."
She often accompanied her father to the Museum of Natural History in New York, where he painted dioramas and worked on artifacts and exhibits while she sketched the art, clothing, and ancient cultural artifacts she saw throughout the museum. "I studied a world of mediums, including sand painting, beadwork, quill work, bark painting, wood and ivory carvings, clay, and textiles," she writes. "At home I roamed the woods, made trails, built miniature villages or life-sized dwellings, and got into stream beds and played with the clay. I have always worked with a visual language. Drawing was the key to all the mediums, and the core of all my activities."
Deidre finally began working with fabric when her three-year-old daughter showed an interest in fabric books. Finding the commercial offerings unimaginative and unattractive, Deidre decided to make a fabric book for her daughter. She created 20 11- by 13-inch panels and sewed them together, accordion style, titling the book The Beast at Bed's End. Six years later, she took the book apart and stitched the panels into a quilt for exhibition in a museum. "It is the only quilt I've ever made," she says. "To me it is still a storyboard that reads across without words, in comic book fashion."
The quilt marked the beginning of Deidre's romance with fabric. "In this work, I honed my skills and began to glimpse how incredibly flexible and plastic this medium could be," she explains. "My roots are in painting, and now my paint is fabric."
For a time Deidre experimented with various subjects, including landscape, still life, and portraiture. It wasn't long before she moved to fabric representations of the people around her. She went to a local nursing home and sketched the faces of its residents, then translated her sketches into fabric portraits. "To this day I am pulled by my series on elders, by all issues on aging, and by how age-related issues impact the way we live," she says. "I feel the need to connect my work directly to my community."
She talks about this evolution and her artistic growth in Work in Fabric & Thread. Besides The Elders, in which she celebrated the people who have helped shape her, Deidre created a series called The Last Year, in which she examined one woman's natural progression toward the end of life. "By disregarding death," Deidre writes, "our society disregards the intensity and preciousness of life."
She is passionate about raising society's awareness of the beauty and wisdom of age. Her book dedication reads, "In memory of my Nana, Constance Gillis Sampiere, and all grandmothers and wise women."
Deidre Scherer's work has been featured in more than 90 individual and group shows around the world. She was honored at the tenth International Congress on Care of the Terminally Ill in 1994 for her advocacy on behalf of "the most frail among us." Since the late 1980s, her work has appeared in juried shows of the American Craft Council, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Smithsonian. Her work hangs in private collections throughout the United States, Canada, and Great Britain.
"When my three daughters were young," Deidre recalls, "we all lived in the 15- by 30-foot attic room of an old farmhouse. My work area consisted of a single table, several boxes, and some shelves in a cramped corner. Eventually, through a slow evolution, the girls and I expanded into the rest of the house, and I established the attic as my studio."
Today her girls are grown and Deidre lives in the Vermont farmhouse with her husband, Steve. She is working on a new series of life-sized fabric-and-thread panels called Surrounded by Family and Friends.
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