Liz O’Brien is pleased to announce that we are now representing artist Carson Converse. While Carson’s practice references quilt making, she takes the trifecta of traditional techniques: color choice, intricate piecing and abundant delicately stitched quilting, and redefines it with her own vocabulary. In her work the colors are rich and lush or pale and minimal, but always intriguing and subtle, even when glazed with a golden wash.

But it is the quilting, dense and rhythmic, that separates her work from the Amish and  Gee’s Bend quilters she claims as her creative forebears. Quilting, the final step in the  construction process, is traditionally in service of the piecing, emphasizing the design and  securing the sandwich of top, batting and back. In Carson’s work, her machine quilting  plays an equal role with color and layout, sometimes dominating the layers that it holds  together. Closely stitched rows of color not only add texture and dimensionality to the  surface, but also change the hand of the finished pieces from a traditional cozy  cottonness to a stiff and tapestry-like heft.

Carson recently completed her second collaboration with Hermès on bespoke quilts.  These works reference traditional quilt making – the first group was whole cloth pieces  with gold stitching and the second was colorful geometric pieced compositions – but made  in luxurious cashmere. These pieces debuted at Milan Design Week 2022.

Carson Converse
Inheritance, 2022
dense quilting over hand-painted and hand-dyed fabric
48 x 44 inches

Carson Converse
Untitled, 2020
wholecloth quilt in hand-painted cotton fabric
33 x 30 inches

Carson Converse
Deconstructed 2015
quilted panel is cut into small half-square triangles
41.25 x 38 x 1.75 inches

Carson Converse is an artist and designer based in Western Massachusetts.
After studying sculpture at Boston University, her interest in decorative arts
and architecture led her to complete a master’s degree in interior design from the
New England School of Art and Design. She continues to work in a range of disciplines,
often blurring the line between craft, fine art, and design.