My name is Ruth Keys. I studied Biochemistry and spent an industrial year at ICI at Alderley Park in Cheshire, where I met Sqeze and married him at the end of that year. I followed him – and his jobs – around England: Bristol where I did my PGCE, then Maidstone where I taught for a year at a large comprehensive school in Dartford (The Downs). From the UK we moved to Germany in 1980 for a couple of years and seem to have got stuck here for the moment. First Stuttgart where I taught English as a foreign language, then Munich where for nearly 2 years I worked at the Max Planck Institute for Psychiatry and then finally deciding if you can’t beat ‘em join ‘em, I retrained as a programmer and started my longest career to date in the IT world.
After working for a number of different software houses and consulting companies, I have been a freelance consultant in the area of quality management and software testing since 1999. You can find out more about that part of my life on my other web site.
I’m currently trying to decide what my 5th career should be. I think I’ve had enough of computers now – they still don’t understand me. It would be nice if I could turn my textile art into a money earner.
I collect cat names – for the pussy cats I’m going to share my home with when I retire (soon I hope) or work from home. Cats and quilting seem to go nicely together. The current list of cat names goes like this:
Boddington, Napoleon, Pixel, Smilla, George, …
Artist Statement
From both my mother and my grandmother I learnt how to sew, knit, crochet, embroider and stitch needlepoint. My quilts are the current manifestation of a lifetime interest in needlework. Making quilts is the creative counterpoint to my daytime job in the technical world and the chance to see tangible fruits of my labours.
Tessellations have always fascinated me. Whereas others doodle squiggles, I have always drawn tumbling blocks. Patchwork is the ideal medium to pursue this interest. Colour is an important design element of the quilts for me. I enjoy exploring the entire spectrum in my work, although bright clear colours predominate. I hand dye my own cotton fabrics and combine these with commercially printed fabrics. I machine quilt the pieces and see this as another layer of the design that must complement the fabric piecing.
I am making small quilts which are works of art rather than household objects. There are three areas I want to explore further: adding a third dimension through texture, incorporating other techniques such as weaving into the quilts, and adding surface embellishment such as hand embroidery and beading.
When people see my work, I’d like them to be attracted by the design and composition, find details to surprise and delight them, and on close inspection, appreciate the quality of workmanship that has gone into the creation of the quilt.