American quilter Zak Foster specialises in memory quilts and burial quilts. “I love being able to preserve the stories and connect with people. “Working with different fabrics leads to a different creative path from me as an artist” He is currently based out of New York. His quilts are “improvised to the last stitch,” and are as zero waste as possible.

Firstly where did you grow up and where do you live now? 

I grew up in a small town in North Carolina and I moved to Brooklyn with my partner in 2008 and have been here ever since. 

What is your background in textiles?

I’m primarily self taught. I started experimenting, watched a lot of You Tube videos and it grew from there. I’ve been quilting for 10 years next February. I’m currently transitioning form being a high school public school teacher to a full time quilt artist. 

How do you find the time to quilt and have a full time job?

I do it here and there: before work, on lunch breaks, before bed! After work I can usually squeeze in an hour or two and then I do a lot in summer holidays.

How do you describe your work?

Improvised. There is a rarely a plan in mind when I start, it is improvised to the last stitch. Also zero waste is important. I don’t waste anything. I use repurposed fabrics, mostly clothes. I go to thrift stores and friends call me if they are having a wardrobe clear out. Recently I’ve made a lot of memory quilts and some burial quilts too. It’s important for me to keep stories and memories intact with quilts as much as possible.

What are memory and burial quilts?

I love making memory quilts as they hold so many memories for the people I make them for and they are from fabrics they have spent so much time with. There is an energy infused in the fabric making them is almost spiritual at times. It is a huge act of trust for people and I love being able to preserve stories and connect with people. As an artist working with different fabrics leads to a different creative path for me. 

Burial quilts are a natural extension of the memory quilt. You have them when you are alive and they are used to cover the body when you die. There is a long history of shrouding and stories of people wrapped in quilts for burial. Using fabrics we’ve spent our lives in is special to people and making a quilt they will have throughout their life and afterwards can provide comfort and solace. There are so many unknowns around death that having a burial quilt present can provide peace of mind. Also presenting the body back to the earth to sustain other forms of life is critical in my view. Our bodies are made of organic elements that we borrow over the course of our lives: every bite of food that grows from the earth that we put in our mouths is only on loan to us. Burial quilts allow those organic resources to return back to the soil that has sustained us for so many years so that future life may also be sustained.  

How do you create a piece?

To begin I sort what fabrics I can work with and choose two to three colours to start and then round our the colour palette from them. Then I start playing around on my design wall. I start putting unsewn pieces of fabric up in different arrangements, waiting for something to catch my eye. Once that happens, I try to replicate it as much as possible. 

I know this is a hard question but how long does a bigger piece take?

30 – 40 hours. I’ve become pretty quick over the years and do a lot by machine. I do enjoy hand quilting but I can achieve a lot more with my time using a machine. But for me it’s not all about saving time necessarily. There was a wonderful exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art a few years back called Manus x Machina that really shifted my thinking on machine-work. I love hand-sewing, and it’s really having its moment right now, but there’s also something to be said for machine-work. There’s a degree of precision that one can achieve that can be really lovely. 

Do you have any advice for aspiring textile artists?

Play, play, play! And don’t be afraid of the fabric. When I started quilting I bought a lot of fabrics but this made me so nervous! I had spent so much money on fabrics that I didn’t want to make any expensive mistakes. This was one of the things that pushed me to use repurposed fabrics early on to be honest. They give you an element of surprise and a lack of control which I find liberating. 

http://www.zakfoster.com

https://www.instagram.com/zakfoster.quilts/