Essay: Christine Tedesco

CHRISTINE TEDESCO

By Wim Roefs

In Christine Tedesco’s quilts and textile pieces, the quilters of Gee’s Bend meet modern artists such as Josef Albers, 1960s color field painters and even Sean Scully. While Albers was hard to miss, Tedesco arrived at her style well before becoming aware of the Benders or the likes of Scully. But Tedesco shares with the quilters the traditional textile craft of the U.S. South, where she developed her interest in the medium. She also shares with them a modern abstract aesthetic.

Isolated from the modern art world, the Benders developed their remarkable style from the early 20th century in rural Southwest Alabama using old clothing and discarded fabric. Tedesco came to her style in part through formal art education, using fancier fabrics, especially silk. Tedesco’s quilts are “reminiscent of 20th century modern master Josef Albers’ paintings that explore the shifting character of color based on its neighboring color,” curator Lori Kornegay wrote for the 1999 South Carolina Arts Commission exhibition Practical Extravagance. They “reveal an examination of the architecture of color while also functioning as beautiful adornments for a bed or a chair.”

Tedesco mostly uses dupioni silk, which is often woven from two different colors of thread and shimmers and changes colors in the light. She makes vibrant, both colorful and more monochromatic textile pieces that show sure but fluid line work. While Tedesco creates both symmetrical and asymmetrical patterns, she also matches symmetry and asymmetry in a single design, placing smaller shapes off-center within an overall symmetrical, often grid-like design.

Tedesco is an architect, and her geometric compositions and patterns have an architectural quality in which shape and color interplay. Wallpaper magazine in 1999 referred in that context to Tedesco’s “rational approach to the design of each work and her recognition of the parallels between architectural construction and that of her own craft.”

During studies in Italy in the early 1990s she discovered Italian tile design. “I began to notice the beautiful tile work that was everywhere throughout the country,” Tedesco says. “I began to photograph, draw and make watercolors of these tiles.” Tile design and architectural design provided her with a visual vocabulary for her textile works. “I also began to incorporate the gold and jewel tones of mosaics in Italian and Byzantine churches.”

But the initial impetus for Tedesco’s art came from her upbringing in the South, where she grew up loving the creativity of cooking and sewing, including making clothing and handbags. “Later, the study of architecture furthered my visual awareness for things in a built environment,” Tedesco says. “The act of making or creating anything, whether it is a simple tile pattern, drafting a complex technical drawing or making a quilt or garment has always been an artistic endeavor for me.”