Leah Evans' Textiles: Maps as Quilts

Leah Evans makes these hand-sewn quilts that channel cartographic themes. Just like us, her current work combines aerial photography, maps, and satellite imagery. But unlike us, she uses appliqué, reverse appliqué, piecing, natural and synthetic dyeing, needle-felting, hand printing, and a variety of embroidery stitches. Intriguingly, she says it is the use of maps in organizing our ideas of land that interests her most of all. The maps themselves “are not consciously based on specific places,” she writes. “For me they are intimate explorations of map language and imagined landscapes.”