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Joan Hug-Valeriote is a native and once again a resident of Guelph, Ontario, after more than 30 years in Toronto. Joan has been sewing since early childhood and quilting since 1977, while working in the film business and teaching French. She began creating art quilts in 1995 and is now an award-winning professional quilt-artist and long-arm quilter, having had pieces juried into shows such as Road to California and the Waterloo Quilt Festival Ontario Juried Show, The Grand National and the Canadian Quilters Association Juried Show. Her quilting has been influenced by international travel as well as five years living in Switzerland, France and Spain, and four years in California.
Joan began accepting commissions and doing computer-assisted quilt design while in California. In 1999, after her return to Ontario, she started teaching quilting classes and workshops and giving lectures. In 2002, she began using a long-arm quilting machine. She is a Visiting Artist in Education, receiving grants from the Ontario Arts Council, to go into elementary schools to teach quilting. Joan is a member of the Royal City Quilters’ Guild, a founding member and past President of the East Toronto Quilters Guild and she pioneered an art therapy quilting program for teenage single mothers in Santa Ana, California. Her body of work includes traditional and contemporary pieces, including bed quilts, artistic wall hangings and wearable art. It ranges from small “almost Amish” pieces to Japanese quilted wall-hangings, as well as landscapes and framed textile art. Her “Contemporary Tumbling Blocks” and “Not Quite Escher’s Birds in the Air” with its metamorphosis of a three-dimensional bird to a flat quilt block known traditionally as “Birds in the Air”, epitomize her penchant for re-envisioning traditional designs in a contemporary manner. She re-interprets well-known and much-loved patterns and settings using saturated, bold colours and unconventional forms and placement.
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Shows
Two recent pieces make statements of political and social relevance. “The Ghosts of Heritage Past” features photographs of architectural gems that have been demolished, transferred to transparent silk organza with her computer printer and layered over photos of the “shoe-box” buildings that replaced them.
“Too Much Night Light” is a 3-D representation of a fluorescent light fixture thought to be a factor in causing breast cancer in women who work at night.