Folk Art Quilts

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Hélène Blanchet, "Beautiful Badlands," 2016, textile, 19" x 39"

Folk art is a little like pornography. It’s hard to define. But you know it when you see it.

Hélène Blanchet, a Nova Scotian, first realized her brightly coloured, hand-stitched quilts were folk art when she saw how they blended in at folk art galleries. Her work, she says, stood out like “a sore thumb” alongside other kinds of art.

She won awards and was embraced by William Roach, a well-known Acadian woodcarver who started selling her quilts at his tourist-friendly folk art shop in Cheticamp, a fishing village on Cape Breton Island.

Then, in 2011, Blanchet’s life and art were transformed by a move from Cape Breton to Calgary. For three years, Blanchet and her husband spent weekends driving around rural Alberta and Saskatchewan. Their travels inspired her to create 18 quilts depicting prairie scenes. Fourteen of them are on a year-long journey through Manitoba galleries and museums, mainly in small communities, courtesy of the Manitoba Arts Network, an arts touring organization. Her exhibition, Prairie Days, is currently at the New Iceland Heritage Museum in Gimli, north of Winnipeg.

“We are so pleased to be hosting Hélène’s exhibit – it is stunning,” says Julianna Roberts, the museum’s executive director.

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Hélène Blanchet, "The Gardener's House," 2013, textile, 39" x 19"

Blanchet's whimsical quilts are intensely colourful and amazingly detailed with fabric appliqués, embroidery and beads. There are bucolic fields with buffalo, geese-filled sloughs, lush gardens and onion-domed Orthodox churches. There are also cityscapes with towering highrises. All the scenes are as carefree as the drawings in a children’s picture book. Each is enclosed by a wooden frame that is painted in acrylics, continuing the scene on the quilt.

All of Blanchet’s quilts offer what she sees as the secret of folk art – the indestructible spirit of the artist. She points to Nova Scotia’s most famous folk artist, the late Maud Lewis, an impoverished, disabled woman who created joyful, naïf paintings of her rural home and its surroundings. “She had a very difficult life and no matter what was going on in her life, her spirit came through,” says Blanchet.

Likewise, Blanchet’s resolutely cheery prairie quilts never betray her struggles. 

“It doesn’t matter what is going on in your life, the spirit in the work is always there,” says Blanchet. “When I worked on that (prairie) series, I was going through a difficult period, when my sister was very ill and she ended up passing away. Folk art is an inner spirit that isn’t broken no matter what is going on in a person’s life.”

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Hélène Blanchet, "Pink City," 2017, textile, 39" x 19"

Blanchet has not always made quilts. She started embroidering and arranging painterly fabric art pictures as a teenager. Then, in 2006, she saw an exhibit of art quilts in Halifax and refocused. She has never looked back.

In Calgary, Blanchet worked as professional gardener and fell in love with Alberta’s colours, particularly yellow, which seemed to be everywhere on the Prairies.

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Hélène Blanchet, "The CFA," 2012, textile, 39" x 19"

Then there was pink. Despite Blanchet’s passion for cheerful colours, she hated pink and had never used it. But, in Calgary, she decided to challenge herself and depict the city's office towers in pink. Now, she loves the colour. And the result? A quilted city that looks like Oz at the end of a yellow brick road. Indeed, Blanchet’s quilts depict the Prairies as a fantastical place, giving us something to dream about as we cherish folk art's indomitable spirit. ■  

Hélène Blanchet: Prairie Days is on view at the New Iceland Heritage Museum in Gimli, Man., from Feb. 17 to April 26, 2021. The exhibition will move on to Killarney and Dauphin.

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