Laura Deleski

Exhibit

January 12 – February 24, 2023

SMAC Gallery

509 W Main Street, Marshall, MN 56258
(Mailing address: PO Box 55)

Regular office hours are:
Monday-Friday 9am-12pm and 1pm-4pm

If you would like to schedule a private viewing or coordinate a visit outside regular office hours, please contact us via email at: info@swmnarts.org

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Life is a Story

Laura Deleski lives in Willmar and works with her husband Stephen at West Central Printing, where she does much of the layout and print design work for their customers. When Laura isn’t working, she loves to express her creative interests through various mediums. She has no formal art training, but enjoyed junior high art classes and studied some photography in high school and college.

She received her first SMAC Individual Emerging Artist Grant in 2021 to create an original piece which merged both quilting and genealogy together into one finished genealogy quilt titled “Life is a Story”.

This project includes photographs from five generations of ancestors on both sides of her family tree. She also designed a digital piece to accompany her quilt which shares a brief narrative about each ancestor, giving viewers an opportunity to learn a small part of their individual stories.

Laura began quilting 23 years ago. Her first quilt was created completely by hand, as she didn’t have a sewing machine at the time. Her quilting abilities were self taught through books in the early years, later utilizing the internet to advance her skills. She enjoys traditional piecing, English paper piecing and needle turn appliqué

techniques.

Laura’s interest in genealogy began in high school. She grew up in St. Cloud and has strong family ties to that area, going back several generations. After taking a DNA test in 2018, she expanded her tree considerably, connecting with previously unknown family members, including a half sister and an aunt. This allowed her to acquire additional photographs for her quilt, as well as new details about older generations.

In addition to quilting, her interests also include, but are not limited to photography, digital and traditional scrapbooking, sashiko Japanese embroidery and locker hooking. Through this most recent project she has also developed a strong affinity for collecting old buttons, as she searched for just the right embellishments to add to her genealogy quilt. She has been working on incorporating buttons into some other pieces as well. She will have works from several mediums in the exhibit.

This is Laura’s first solo art exhibit, but she has shown in several group exhibits as a member of the Little Crow Photography Club of Willmar, the Willmar Country Quilters Guild Biennial Quilt Show and most recently the Minnesota Quilters, Inc. 43rd Annual Quilt Show in the non-judged exhibit.