Sara made her first quilt at the age of 17 while still at school. After many years making quilts for the home during her career as a parliamentary journalist, she joined her local quilting group in the early 1990s, where she discovered the expressive potential of the quilt as an artform. Apart from attending numerous workshops in the early years, she is self-taught.

Since 2004 her quilts have incorporated densely machine-stitched lettering, and it is language that inspires her. She writes her own material, enabling her to play with text in visual form and use it to comment on social and personal issues, often with a dash of humour.

Her quilts have been exhibited nationally and internationally. In addition to winning QUILT 2006 at the Festival of Quilts that year, she has twice had pieces selected for Quilt National in the United States. She has work in the collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Museum of Arts and Design in New York and The Quilt Museum in York. She is a member of the group Quilt Art and an honorary member of The Quilters' Guild.

Email: sara.impey@gmail.com

Tickbox Culture

This quilt is a response to the box-ticking mindset that increasingly pervades public services. The text purports to be an advertisement for an executive job. It consists of a single sentence peppered with 'management speak', so that it rapidly becomes verbose and almost impossible to read while retaining its grammatical structure. Interlocking with the rest of the script in red is the sentence: 'all a ticked box does is fill a square.' The 'x' in the last word is stitched in the margin, as if making a bid for creative freedom.

Hand-dyed cotton, wholecloth, machine quilted.

132 x 200 cm

2009