Rosalie Dace travels around quite a bit. It makes you wonder how she has time to work on her quilts. Or wall pieces really. Most of her work is using traditional techniques like ironing and stitching. Although she’s South-African, and she travels regularly to New Zealand, Australia and the U.S.A., Rosalie’s main inspiration comes from the Indian community in Durban. They’ve influenced her a lot with their colorful materials that we know all too well. Any picture in India will show a vast selection of colors. Deep, rich glowing colors. They’re not afraid of the strong colors at all. Even though the Indian inspiration is strong, Africans have a different sense of color, and it’s this sense that you’ll see in her work. It’s her environment and it’s not the normal western ‘pretty’ style.
When starts working on a piece, she starts with the desired color range. Then Rosalie selects fabrics that suits the subtlety and variety in the chosen color range as opposed to looking for materials that will create contrast. You’ll find materials like silk, velvet and brocade in her wall pieces. What she loves about the fabrics is that they give you the sense that you can feel the colors. The colors go right through the material, and that makes working fabric exciting for Rosalie. She has an abstract style, that she teaches as well. It’s contemporary quilt making. With contemporary issues. Topics like the situation in Iraq and Afghanistan are important to her. She’s a citizen of the world, and needs to be aware of what’s going on, you have to be concerned with the world. Making pretty flowers on her quilt won’t make Rosalie tick.
It’s not until Rosalie was asked to show her work in Color Objects, and was thinking about it, that she realized what her real obsession is. It’s light. Without light, she wouldn’t be able to see properly!
