Bio and Promotional Materials for Group Events

I’m so excited to be a part of your quiltmaking! Here are materials to help you promote this unique event.

Under 100 Words Bio:

Before Heidi Parkes was born in Chicago, IL in 1982, her grandmother organized a collaborative family quilt to commemorate her birth. Based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin since 2015, her quilting and mending celebrate the hand, and her works tug at memories, shared experience, materiality, and embodiment. Engaging in the worlds of art, quilts, mending, and social media, Heidi is an advocate for the domestic realms, slow stitching, and mindfulness. Find her on Instagram and YouTube. She is the 2024 Pfister Hotel Artist in Residence, and a 2005 graduate from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Short Bio:

Before Heidi Parkes was born in Chicago, IL in 1982, her grandmother organized a collaborative family quilt to commemorate her birth. Now based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin her quilting and mending celebrate the hand, and her works tug at memories and shared experience. Often using specific textiles, like an heirloom tablecloth, bed sheet, or cloth tea bag, Heidi adds subtle meaning and material memory from the start. Engaging in the worlds of art, quilts, mending, and social media, Heidi is an advocate for the domestic realms, slow stitching, and mindfulness. Find her on Instagram and YouTube. She is the 2024 Pfister Hotel Artist in Residence, and a 2005 graduate from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Longer Bio:

Before Heidi Parkes was born in Chicago, IL in 1982, her grandmother organized a collaborative family quilt to commemorate her birth. This set the tone for a life centered on the handmade- raised in a home where sewing, mending, cooking, canning, woodworking, photography, ceramics, painting, and plasterwork were the norm.

Now based in Milwaukee, her quilting and mending celebrate the hand, and her works tug at memories and shared experience. Often using specific textiles, like an heirloom tablecloth, bed sheet, or cloth teabag, Heidi adds subtle meaning and material memory from the start. Ever curious, she works with a variety of quilting techniques including visible hand piecing and knots, improvisation, patchwork, and applique. Heidi pursues her passion for teaching by lecturing and leading workshops, and shares her creative process with thousands on Instagram. Heidi has exhibited in art and textile museums across the country and was an Artist in Residence at Milwaukee’s Lake Park through the ARTservancy with Gallery 224 in fall 2020-21. She is the 2024 Pfister Hotel Artist in Residence. Additionally, Heidi lives a handmade lifestyle, sewing her own clothes, fermenting, eating from pottery she made a decade ago, and practicing hand yoga, which she shares with other creatives on her YouTube channel.

Short Artist’s Statement:

My quilts are hand-stitched at nearly every phase with piecing, appliqué, embroidery, and quilting. I approach my compositions improvisationally, yielding to the circumstances of my daily life by sewing in meetings, on airplanes, and while on-the-go. This lighthearted approach admits to the ephemeral constraints of the everyday and yearns to create beauty with a process that mirrors and reveals the stresses of daily life. I use material meaning, diagrams, labor, repetition, and artifacts to invoke sympathetic magic and the law of attraction. Thus, I filter my wholehearted and tender desires through a lens of abstraction, maintaining my personal privacy while inviting viewers in with relatable and specific imagery. My quilt, Verdant, Aim, Nimble, Soften depicts the calendar for 2021, casting a spell to invite a similar abundant green energy into the future. My animal familiar, the rabbit, appears in many works as a self-portrait and stand-in for myself.