Kestrel Michaud

Artist Statement

The Artist is a classically-trained, imaginative realism fine artist with a passion for illustrating in fabric. They started working with fabric in 2004 as a Junior in high school. By the time they graduated in 2006, The Artist had developed their own unique style and technique and had completed almost 30 unique fabric pictures. Their work was hanging and selling in galleries across Pennsylvania as part of the National Road Heritage Corridor program. The Artist had also won more than 50 local, regional, national, and international awards for their artwork, including a Grand Prize for the Student Art Competition at the 62nd World Science Fiction Convention when they were 15 years old.
The Artist attended the Ringling College of Art and Design, beginning in the fall of 2006. Although their entire admissions portfolio was comprised of fabric artwork, they tried to avoid fabric in college and focus on other media instead because they didn’t think fabric had a future. But once The Artist’s professors saw their online fabric portfolio, they wouldn't let The Artist work in any other medium. The Artist’s senior thesis of six gallery-sized fabric artworks were made entirely in fabric. In 2010, The Artist graduated with honors and a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Illustration, having gained an extensive understanding of how to create captivating works of art out of fabric.
Until 2017, The Artist worked as a full-time graphic designer, working with organizations including Judith Leiber, Kenneth Cole, and NASA. That year, their passion for fabric was reawakened by discovering there were other artists in the world using fabric to create art. They made their first art quilt in 2018, won their first major award in 2019, and have gone on to win top prizes at quilt shows across the country. In 2021, The Artist won a Grand Prize at the International Quilt Festival in Houston, the largest quilt festival in the world. Their works have also traveled to galleries, museums, and quilt shows across the US and internationally to countries including France, England, South Korea, the Czech Republic, and Australia.
All of The Artist’s quilts are in the style of imaginative realism. The Artist has an entire imaginary steampunk world in their head, complete with characters, locations, and events. They combine the lessons they learned in college about visual storytelling with their talent working with fabric to create quilts that tell stories from this fictional realm in a visual style that makes the imagery look real, even though it’s not.
The Artist’s technical style is called fused, raw-edge appliqué, and their quilts are notably different from their early fabric pictures because the fabric pictures did not include stitching. Each quilt is comprised of hundreds or thousands of individual pieces of fabric, some even smaller than the tip of a fingernail. They cut and assemble them like a puzzle made from overlapping pieces. Each piece of fabric is fused in place with a heat-sensitive fabric glue before being quilted at a density of 1/8”-1/16”. The Artist stitches their designs by free-motion quilting, which means they move the fabric under the needle of their sewing machine to “draw” lines out of thread.
They are also pioneering the use of technology in quilt design and creation. The Artist’s process for creating their work is entirely self-developed, and after learning about art quilts in 2017, they pushed to convert their formerly analog process to digital. They draw their designs on an iPad, develop a full pattern in Illustrator, use a Cricut cutting machine to cut their fabrics, and developed a method to entirely prevent the fabric from fraying. The Artist has also invented a process to accurately select fabrics for their digital designs using self-created paper color swatches.
Today, the Artist works as a full-time, professional quilt artist, exhibiting and selling their work around the world. They also share their knowledge by teaching their process through Patreon, live and virtual lectures, and live workshops. This year, The Artist was invited to be a guest on The Quilt Show and Quilting Arts TV. The former was published on July 30. The latter will air on PBS in January 2024. The Artist and their work have been featured in a number of magazines, including Quilting Arts Magazine, Quiltfolk, and Art Quilting Studio. Their work has graced the covers of bUneke magazine and the SAQA Journal. Their fine art training, creative mind, inventive nature, decades of experience, and unique style make The Artist’s work unlike that of any other artist.