Women of Ohio

This week we welcome the versatile Angie Terry, who loves creating through drawing, painting, ceramics, textiles, pysanky, bead embroidery and off-loom bead weaving. She is an educator, living in Chillicothe, Ohio. Angie is a member of the Chillicothe Art League and sells her artwork in Chillicothe’s Pump House Center for the Arts and through her Etsy shop ArtMadebyTerry.

Below, Angie talks about her artwork garden song and how it reflects the relationship of many Ohio women with home arts. Many women of the past who did not have the same creative opportunities thrived in home arts and expressed themselves through whatever mediums they could find.

My Garden Song textile art honors the many women in my community and throughout Ohio who focus on the home arts. This includes cultivating vegetable gardens, cooking and canning their bounty, and beautifying our towns and cities with landscaping and decorative gardens. Most communities include at least one gardening club, and Chillicothe, where I live, has Story Place Garden Club. Their mission is to share knowledge of horticulture and floriculture and to educate our community about the importance of incorporating native keystone plant species into our gardens. 

I created this textile by first making marks with acrylic paint on two different colors of fabric. Brushes, rubber stamps, bottle caps and sticks were used as mark-making tools. Then I cut the fabric into smaller rectangles, reassembled and pieced these fabrics together to form a backdrop. On this, I appliquéd and embroidered in a freestyle manner. At first, my hand stitches merely followed the trail of the marks I’d made, or worked to blend harsh edges where the different fabrics met. Then my lines turned into an overgrown garden scene, with an applique bird landing on a coiling vine and singing by moonlight.

The textile art techniques I used honor the history of the many women in Ohio who enriched their home life by creating with textiles. They sewed clothing for their families, created decorative linens and curtains for their homes and community buildings, and kept their families warm and protected under quilts in the winter. Quilt tops were often pieced by one woman, but the quilt layers were sewn together in women’s gatherings or quilting bees. I hope that these snips and stitches I’ve made remind the viewer of her own ancestors who gardened, canned and cooked and also used needle and thread to sustain the lives of their families.

To follow Angie’s work, go to Facebook: angie.terry.904, Instagram: artmadebyterry or her Etsy Shop: ArtMadebyTerry.Etsy.com