Audrey Hyvonen works with bright colors, bold contrast, asymmetry, and thinks outside the box. After being raised in Ohio and then raising her own family in Massachusetts, she now lives with her husband in Northwest Montana among handfuls of her cousins.
A creative kid, as a child she was inventing backyard games, crafting witches brews, creating homemade gifts, designing rubber-stamped cards, and cooking. She danced in high school, attended non-traditional Hampshire College where she designed her own course of study, and trained in the martial arts long enough to earn her black belt. She soon after joined a recreational circus school as both student and staff. As excited as a kid in a candy shop, she started quilting as a hobby just after walking into a fabric store for the first time. That was twenty years ago and she has never looked back.
Her first notable projects were an eclectic collection of immersive experiences for the public. She wrote grants and received funding for a traffic-calming stilt-walking quilt parade, a pop-up tour of a quilt in progress, and a city-wide outdoor front porch quilt tour in Massachusetts during COVID. In the midst of the pandemic shutdown, she moved west with the whole family. The relocation brought changes in her community, studio, rhythm, and her art practice. Working now from a side table in a bedroom, she started making more fiber collages and focusing less on community collaborations. Her quilted work has toured internationally through SAQA’s Opposites Attract exhibition, as well as nationally in Threads of Resistance. Locally, she was excited to have a design featured on an electrical box in downtown Kalispell and to have work both accepted and sold in this year’s holiday show at the Radius Gallery in Missoula. She’s eager to continue discovering joy and playfulness in future bodies of work and to find new ways to expand her reach, inviting others to join in the fun.
Statement
My work is a playful exploration of the ideas in my head. I care more about how pieces communicate than each artwork’s perfection, and I hope that they serve as an invitation for others to express their joy and curiosity about the world and our roles in it. I want us to remember that we can do hard things and that celebrating our tiny wins together is our best way forward.
I layer and fuse printed fabrics to create collaged images with both reverence and whimsy. I then follow a quilt formula of adding batting and backing, stitching these three layers together. The works are meant to be hung in places where you might see them daily for a little boost of brightness and inspiration. I am drawn to using bright colors, bold contrast, asymmetry, and I usually think outside the box. I often incorporate secret surprises that bring the viewer in closer and like to use a collaged botanical or a flower frame, creating little scenes you can enter and hang out in.
I get excited when I feature an animal in a piece. Living in Montana, that animal has been a bison for a while. It seems an easy entry; people care about them. They each have personalities, are engaging, and, as we anthropomorphize them, become symbolic of our own emotions and behaviors. Bison are known to face into a storm and circle to protect their young, exemplifying the behavior I crave from my own community. As the personal becomes political, my work serves as a soft entry into hard topics in gentle and usually subtle ways. As I move forward in this body of work, I’m deliberately exploring playful and surprising colors that spark curiosity. This is about celebrating small wins and discoveries, which I think our world is missing in a lot of ways. I'm trying to add it back in.