The collage artist speaks toDominique Corlettabout paper, quilts, and the obsessive drive to collect
HEIRLOOMS OF THE FUTURE
FACING PAGE Six of the nine Paper Quilt Collages taken from Sarah’s original paper-cut collages, made exclusively for The Shop Floor Project and available as limited-edition giclée prints. Clockwise from top left: The Quilt of Assemblage; The Quilt of Birds, Insects and Two Squirrels; The Quilt of Medals; The Quilt of Cleaning; The Quilt of the Garden; The Quilt of Delft, £125 each, The Shop Floor Project.
Despite being known for her exquisitely intricate collages, it’s textiles, rather than paper, that have been the constant in Sarah Battle’s life. Her home, in the Pennine village of Diggle, is the 18th-century weaver’s cottage in which she grew up; the attic space that is now her paper-cutting studio once having housed the looms. Her first degree, meanwhile, was in Printed Textiles, and later she worked for Jenny Frean’s First Eleven Studio, creating furnishing fabrics for the likes of John Lewis, Liberty and Next.
But when the studio closed at the beginning of lockdown, Sarah knew the time was right to switch material allegiances and focus full-time on her passion, which is making small, whimsical paper collages of collections of ephemera.
While paper has Sarah’s full attention these days, her interest in textiles hasn’t disappeared. A recent collaboration with upmarket online craft gallery, The Shop Floor Project, involved making a series of ‘paper quilts’. With titles such as the The Quilt of Matchboxes, The Quilt of Medals and The Quilt of The Garden, each of these square pictures features a pleasing composition of quirky items, grouped together by subject on a black background and surrounded by a decorative border. The pictures – available as limited-edition prints – can be purchased and displayed individually, or in a square of nine to create a larger quilt. Sarah describes the paper quilts topic as ‘a gift’, as she has always been fascinated by quilting and the placing of objects within a square, which she describes as ‘a composition that shouldn’t work, but does’.
An interest in collecting sits at the heart of her work, and to do her research she spends hours poring over public and private collections online. It was while looking at the quilts in New York’s American Folk Art Museum that the similarities between what she does and quilting first struck her. ‘It’s a
