Clara Wainwright’s new exhibition at the Paul Dietrich Gallery at Cambridge Seven, “GLORY: A Satirical Retrospective of Fabric Collages,” is a kind of hallucinatory storyboard of a trip through Wainwright’s mind as it considers the insane chaos of the current Trumpian political gestalt.
Her fabric collages are not exactly quilts, though each has three layers like a quilt, but they are smaller in size compared to traditional quilts which are large. These are basically fabric paintings, varying in size from about 18” x 20” to a bit over 46” x 23”, some ironed on to fiberglass backing. “I love to sew,” she said, working mostly by machine, sometimes hand-embroidering or painting over designs and adding sequins.
Though she said that it was Matisse, Modigliani and Picasso who influenced her style originally, she’s been involved with so many multicultural and multiracial communities over the years that those influences have also seeped in.
To me, her art has a traditional Persian feel, and indeed an acquaintance once suggested that Wainwright had a past life in Afghanistan. It is as if her fabrics speak to her of their varied origins and those origins express themselves in the style of each particular work.