April 20, 2006
Her art isn’t art ’til she gives it away
Lili Angel’s art is like a Buddhist monk’s sand painting — she spends days or weeks creating it, and then it’s gone. But in her case the work is given away rather than destroyed.
“My husband is always surprised when I have something in my studio that’s for us,” Angel said. “Most things I give to other people.”
Angel, a cataloguer for the UW Libraries, likes to spend her weekends making things out of fabric. She’s made quilts, Christmas stockings and dolls, among other things, and says she pretty much has a project going all the time.
“I’m very goal oriented,” Angel said. “I’ve always got to be doing something. If I’m not doing this, I’m working in my garden.”
A 23-year employee of the UW, Angel spends her days reading material and writing a description of it, then giving it access points for the catalogue, so people can find it. She commutes from her home near Sultan 25 miles to a park and ride in Bothell, then takes the bus from there. The long trip has her rising at 4 a.m., which means she isn’t up for evening activities when she gets home.
That’s why she confines her art making to weekends, rising at 5 a.m. to go into her studio. The studio, she explains, is just a room in her home where she has a table made out of two bifold doors, so it’s adjustable according to the size of the project. Her husband, who builds furniture, modified a dresser for her so that she can run her sewing machine while standing up, and she has a large closet to store her fabrics away from light.
“I have a triangular space with my ironing board and my cutting table and my sewing machine,” Angel said. “I can go in there and not come out for six or seven hours.”
Most of the quilts she makes are of the decorative variety, designed to be hung on the wall rather than used on a bed. She’s made everything from a single patch to a full-sized quilt. A number of the full-sized ones have been raffled off for worthy causes.
Sometimes she uses a pattern, Angel said, but once she’s learned how to make something, she likes to branch out and do her own thing. At times she buys something such as a teddy bear and takes it apart to see how it was made. Then she makes use of the techniques she’s learned.
Angel’s fabric work began almost 20 years ago, when she bought herself a book on quilting. She’d taken a course in ceramics as an undergraduate, she explained, but she was living in a small place then and didn’t want to have to go to a studio elsewhere to create her art. “Quilting just seemed like the easiest thing I could do,” she said.
She never took a class or joined a quilting group; she just learned by doing. Although her first project was a wall hanging made from a pattern, she quickly got bored and moved on to more original things.
Once, Angel and her husband collaborated on a miniature house made out of cedar. It was 14 inches wide, 10 inches long and 10 inches tall. “I made a little fireplace and a chimney out of shells,” Angel said. “It was based on a ‘fairy house’ I saw in a gardening book, something that’s supposed to sit outside. But mine’s still in my studio.”
Lately, Angel said, she’s been spending more time on dolls, which she says end up expressing characters. “They come to life. You’re starting to make something and all of a sudden it becomes an entity. It’s kind of a joyful process.”
Sometimes it all turns out in an unexpected way, as when she took three rejected dolls’ heads, mounted them on a huckleberry branch from her property and called it “Goddesses of the Leaf.”
Angel doesn’t have any idea how many things she’s made over the years, although in one particularly productive period from September to December she completed seven projects. But she gives most of them away without even photographing them, and has been known to have friends point out things she’s made that she’d forgotten about.
“I’m getting something out of the joy of creating and I don’t need to keep everything around me,” she said. “I also like to see the joy in others’ faces when they say, ‘Oh wow, I really like that.’ Maybe a hundred years from now one of these things will survive. I kind of enjoy that, to think that a little piece of me might live on.”
