By Sara Anne Donnelly
Photos by Michael D. Wilson
From our March 2025 issue
Over 30 years working as an environmental scientist and planner, quilting had been Judy Gates’s creative outlet. But in 2020, the medium had her feeling boxed in. “I wanted a way to still use fabric without trying to force myself into cutting pieces a certain way or following a certain pattern,” she says. Inspired by renowned Harpswell fabric-collage artist Susan Carlson and 19th-century Brunswick botanist and watercolorist Kate Furbish, Gates spent two months assembling an eight-ringed spiral with freehand shapes cut from vibrant, patterned batik and batik-style fabrics, which have watercolor quality. Tucked into the rings, and blurring the lines between them, intricate botanical and animal cutouts dance in a rainbow swirl. Viewed from a slight distance, the work conjures a handmade Magic Eye image, with more flora and fauna seeming to emerge from the whorl the longer you stare at it. “It’s my lighthouse,” Gates said on a recent morning in her South Portland dining room, which doubles as a studio. “It shows me that I don’t have to follow a structure and that I have to avoid things that stop me in my tracks.”
Gates has since made about 60 fabric collages evocative of the Maine outdoors. One series immortalizes animals and crops like the ones she tended on a farm in Masardis, in Aroostook County, where she lived in the ’90s; another pays tribute to the bass, salmon, and trout her son catches, as well as his colorful flies. Still others render the birds, insects, amphibians, and animals she spots in and around South Portland. A red fox that roams her neighborhood has been a persistent muse, appearing with his mottled orange coat fairly glowing against a range of starry, snowy backdrops. “I’ve been through lots of lifetimes and I feel like I want to be able to capture each of those lifetimes,” said Gates, a Pittsburgh native who moved to Maine for graduate school in 1982. “That’s when I really developed an appreciation for things that grow and live,” she said. “It’s a pretty rich world out there.”
Gates’s first series reimagined Furbish’s botanical paintings in fabric, with wildflowers of variegated batiks juxtaposed with beige backdrops. “As I continued in my career as a scientist, I felt disconnected from what led me to study plants and biology to begin with,” Gates said. “Working with Furbish’s images was the equivalent of getting dirt under my fingernails again.” Her collages start with a pencil sketch on cloth, onto which she glues fabric cutouts in painterly swaths of subtly varying shades and a mash-up of patterns that create kinetic tension. She sometimes layers tulle over a bird or animal to add depth and shadow, and often applies free-form stitches to highlight features. Vertical or horizontal stitches, running the length of a work, secure the bits and pieces to batting and a muslin backing, and might also simulate swirling water or wood grain.
A scientist and longtime quilter, Gates says nature-themed textile collages allow her to “bridge the biology part of my life and the fabric part.”
During our visit, Gates was at work on a commission of a black-capped chickadee perched on a leafy branch. Seated at her dining-room table, she picked up a length of inky batik with a gray leaf print. “To me, that says feathers,” she said, cutting a tiny oval from the fabric and shing-ling it over others on the bird’s breast to create lifelike plumage. The finished chickadee will flaunt more than 100 of these miniscule pieces in black, gray, and tan, and Gates estimated the entire work would take about eight hours to complete. “Giving myself permission to spend time creating instead of, like, vacuuming the house, that was the hardest part in the beginning,” Gates said. “But now when people ask, ‘What are you going to do when you retire?’ I say I’m going to do more art. I have gotten much better at indulging my psyche.”
Judy Gates’s fabric collages are for sale ($90– $400) at Botanically Curious, in Portland (beginning in May), and at judygates.art.
