R Silver
R Silver is the co-founder, co-organizer, and the head of web at the Community Quilting Bee. She finds natural dyeing a grounding process, that ties her to a specific point in time and location. Outside of her creative practice she spends most of her time studying / working in information security and traveling.
Let’s Play (2023)
This colorful butterfly is made from a child’s tutu I found free on a walk, and a cheap kite I bought in Chinatown LA. I wore the tutu around my neck as a frilly collar and affectionately dubbed it “the party collar.” At one party my very friend was not feeling the party spirit so I placed the party collar on her and declared that it was her time to shine. I only half believed it when I said it, but wouldn’t you know it did the dang thing. With the theme of this year’s quilt being “Let’s Play” it was time to let the transformative powers of the party collar soar. Party on Community Quilt!
Neon Ruins (2022)
For this year’s quilt square, I collaborated with Mike Knives, a silk screen artist with a maximalist, neon aesthetic. We sought to meld our vastly different aesthetic languages into one unified vision which could both be more than the sum of its parts.
I ecoprinted a piece of canvas with hollyhock and marigold foraged from the neighborhood I was temporarily living in for the summer. Ecoprinting creates a timestamp of an ephemeral time and place. The same exact print often appears drastically different depending on the stage of growth, time of year, and soil it grows. I then handed my ecoprinted off fabric off to Mike who add appliques, using fabric he had personally screen printed
Our Envisioned Futures (2021)
For the front, fabric was ecoprinted using conscientiously wildcrafted plants and patchworked together alongside Laub
The back was vat dyed with walnut leaves under smoky skies on the ancestral lands of the Pit River Tribe in so called Big Bend, CA