By Luisa Loi
La Conner Community News
Quilt coats, creepy dolls, knit jackets and sweaters, mixed media jewelry — that’s the kind of experimentation artist Dorothy Bird has been doing for five decades.
And now that work is being displayed on the third floor of the Pacific Northwest Quilt & Fiber Arts Museum in La Conner.
Her exhibit, titled “At Play in the Land of Color,” consists of pieces made almost entirely with materials found at home, in thrift stores and in nature, and can be viewed up until Sept. 13.
Bird, a La Conner resident, described herself as a “dilettante:” whenever she tries something, something else catches her attention before she can dive further into the medium or style she was playing with.
To her, spontaneity is of paramount importance. It’s a quality that led to the creation of her favorite piece, a fetish voodoo doll, which she made on a short deadline for a show in Anacortes, titled “Sticks, Stones and Bones.”
The doll, which is part of a set of four, consists of the body of a Barbie doll, but with the head replaced by the replica of a bird skull she made out of clay, with a frog sitting on top. The doll’s arms are painted with black streaks, and her neck is adorned with a necklace made with real bird bones found at the beach or sourced from roadkill animals.
“I just wanted them to look old and weird,” Bird said.
To clean the bones and carcasses, which she received from a friend and fellow artist, Bird would place them inside an empty aquarium she kept outside of her home, where a colony of beetles would eat any remaining tissue — a technique frequently used by taxidermists.
One of Bird’s main interests is color, with some of her pieces illustrating a question she often asks herself — that is, where does the threshold between colors lie in the spectrum of hues? Where does turquoise green become turquoise blue?
An example of this can be found in the coat she named “When is a plum a prune?,” which illustrates the transition between brown and purple.
The coat depicted in the exhibit’s poster is another celebration of colors, which Bird accomplished by cutting up and hand stitching multiple striped cotton shirts she found at the thrift store, then piecing them together with a sewing machine. Her quilts, she said, are a way to honor the long tradition of women producing quilt garments out of scrap materials.
“You get a way wider range of fabrics available if you shop at thrift stores,” she said.
Despite the long process, Bird finds hand-stitching to be the most enjoyable part of quilt making as it helps her meditate, as does knitting, she said, adding that she learned these skills at 8.
Her passion for fiber art can even be found in her paintings, with most depicting textiles, including the kilim rugs that are traditionally made in the Middle East.
Having an aversion to repetition, Bird never made duplicates of her pieces. That is why, when presented with the opportunity to showcase her art at the museum, she had to reach out to all of the friends she had ever sold or gifted her pieces to since the late 1970s or early ‘80s, asking to borrow them for the show.
Now, she estimates two thirds of the artworks featured at the museum are borrowed, with some of the pieces sent from as far as Los Angeles and Paris.
To see the collection, visit the Pacific Northwest Quilt & Fiber Arts Museum anytime from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Wednesday through Sunday. Community members and craft enthusiasts can also learn more about Bird and her creative process during an artist walkthrough and reception on July 11. For more information, visit qfamuseum.org.
Luisa Loi is a general assignment reporter for La Conner Community News.
