Quilts + Other American Folk Art Inspire This California Creative

American folk art has long been an interest for Berkeley-based artist, craftswoman and activist Lena Wolff—particularly quilts. To her, they are more than just beautiful textiles. Adorned with symbols that allude to events both personal and public, she sees patchwork quilts as potent vehicles for narrative expression and the springboard for her modern interpretations rendered in paper, wood and concrete. “Quilts are so emblematic of our history as a country—and they were a way for women of all strata to have an artistic, if often anonymous, voice,” she says. “I never tire of gazing at the spellbinding patterns.”

The artist is particularly intrigued by a pattern known as the Golden Dahlia. “It’s rare,” Wolff says, “but the underlying geometry is based on the eight-pointed star, which is an iconic quilt pattern that lends itself to an infinite number of riffs.” Armed with a compass and ruler, she has drawn hundreds of star-based variations, some of which evolve into paper collages, while others become sculptures rendered in such woods as walnut, beech and maple. For the latter, Wolff collaborates with a master woodworker who translates her vision employing techniques such as inlay, marquetry and parquetry. To her, this is carrying on a tradition. “These patterns have been adapted and transformed for centuries in our country,” she says. “Mainly between women and across different cultural communities.”

Combining historical patterns with invented motifs, Wolff also creates entire patchwork quilts out of hand-cut paper. A Language for the Commons, for example, is composed of 143 unique squares and contains symbols laden with personal meaning: scissors (craft), scales (equal justice), bee (sustainability), triangle (LGBTQ rights) and radio (free speech), to name a few. Many of these icons appear in “A Pattern Language,” a planned series of 10 quilts rendered in concrete. Wolff was encouraged to explore the medium by her friend Mark Rogero, founder of the design and fabrication studio Concreteworks, where the tiles are produced. As part of the painstaking process, Wolff makes a 3D scan and print of each collage to create molds that are then cast in concrete. “And I probably spend just as much time arranging the tiles into an ideal compositional balance,” says Wolff, who is currently preparing for a solo show opening September 28 and running through mid-November at the Sarah Shepard Gallery in Larkspur.

Although Wolff rarely works with a needle and thread, her aesthetic forebears would likely marvel at the ways in which her pieces honor, respond to and expand upon their labors. “I love being a part of this tradition and claiming it as art,” Wolff says. “Then—as now—it absolutely is art.”