About Pieced
Glass artist Cheryl Wilson Smith’s grandmother used to create hand-stitched quilts from cut squares of fabric. This beautiful wall sculpture with its patchwork pattern, and its soft colour palette in blues, white, gray and green is a remembrance of those colourful quilts.Each wafer-thin square of glass frit (ground glass) is carefully layered into stacks.
The Northern Ontario-based artist is most often inspired by the rugged natural world that surrounds her so this piece signals a subtle intimate shift. Wilson Smith’s art is always an exploration of memory and the passage of time.
I envisioned—"The stacks of cut squares (my grandmother) would have ready to be made into a quilt. And the layers of memories that come with her making those quilts . Arranging and rearranging the fabrics into blocks and then the ladies all together for the quilting bees sitting around the frame. The tea and the dainties.” Cheryl Wilson Smith
She was the 2014 winner of the RBC Award for Glass through the Canadian Clay and Glass Gallery. Wilson Smith has received nine grants from the Ontario Arts Council and one from the Canada Council. Commissions include the Red Lake District Heritage Centre, Margaret Cochenor Memorial Hospital Donor wall. She is the recipient of the prestigious Chalmers Fellowship from the Ontario Arts Council which allowed her to work in Scotland in 2023. Her work has been exhibited widely across Canada, in the UK and the US.
