Locals We Love: Quilter Coulter Fussell

Painter and quilter Coulter Fussell grew up in Columbus, Georgia, an old textile manufacturing and river town that borders Alabama, and now makes her home in Water Valley, Mississippi. Just as Splinter Creek lets the land influence its design, those two locations deeply influence Fussell’s art.

“Landscape being a part of one’s work is inescapable, I feel,” Fussell says.

She forages for black walnut, sumac, goldenrod, and tickseed to make her own natural dyes for her quilting projects, pulling inspiration straight from the North Mississippi hill country.

Today, she owns YaloRun Textiles, a multifunctional creative space and textile supply store on Water Valley’s Main Street which she opened in 2015, and was a recipient of this year’s South Arts Mississippi Fellowship.

But her arts education began much earlier. Her mother Cathy is a skilled quilter and father Fred is a painter, former museum curator, and historian. “My art background was extensive, full, and all-encompassing because of my parents. My brothers and I grew up in a world where the arts, in all its weird and daily forms, were as commonplace as the salt shaker.” Fussell says. “Art was not a separate entity about which one focused. Art was like the air. There was no other way for me. All paths led here.”

She has been painting and quilting her whole life, but it wasn’t until the last few years that quilting took a front seat.

Her process for starting a quilt is less about drawing out a plan in a sketchbook or doing any measuring beforehand, and more about creating a painting with a blank canvas in front of her. It begins with fabric pulled from her collection. She makes her selections based on color and texture, focusing on the notion of light and dark and space. Next, she lays the pieces of fabric out on the floor, uncut.

“I kick the pieces around for a while until something begins to strike,” she says. “Next, I get the scissors and spend the next few days in a locked, silent studio working out the composition. This is the hardest, the most important, and my favorite part of the process. If I’m working a private commission that has a specific thematic focus, then after I get the fabric, there will be a day where I do research in contemporary painting books and on historical quilt collections online. I also might need to read up on some history, depending on the project. It gets real nerdy.”

All of Fussell’s quilts are hand sewn, a traditional take on the quilting process. She also works entirely in vintage fabric, a main source of inspiration.

“There is always evidence of its life lived before it came to me: tears, fades, rips, broken seams. These qualities act as brushstrokes for me,” she says. “Sometimes, it feels my jobs is simply to take the brush strokes that someone already made for me years ago in the experience of living their life in their clothes, and all I do is just put the strokes back in an order that is not even mine. Sometimes the quilts feel predestined.”

When she works on private commissions, they often focus on a specific person.

“It is like abstract quilt portraits using their old clothes or meaningful pieces of fabric from their lives. I love doing this,” Fussell says. “I learn something new and big every time I quilt someone's life.”