War of Words,
130 x 112 cm
Tangle,
56 x 56 cm
Visual Clutter
50 x 50 cm
Thrall 1 metre diameter
Links 4.5 metre chain
Information Overload
106 x 105 cm
Hidden Agenda 3
116 x 123 cm
Fighting Talk
112 x 105 cm
Cognitive Dissonance
45 x 45 cm
Amber Warning
43 x 43 cm
A Post-Truth Puzzle 2
54 x 54 cm
Sara Impey
UK
Sara Impey's quilts feature stitched lettering achieved by free-motion machine embroidery, one letter at a time. This is a painstaking technique, but gives her the freedom to compose the text as she is actually stitching it, so that the words go straight from her brain to her needle. As a former journalist, the combination of two passions – words and stitch – have inspired Sara for more than 20 years and still drive her on.
Her work is rooted in the domestic quilting tradition, yet given an edge by the inclusion of language inspired by contemporary public discourse. She likes to explore the tension between slow, meticulous making and the often volatile rhetoric of the media. She aims to highlight the power of words to persuade, manipulate and sometimes to mislead.
Recent work has focused on the phenomenon of information overload. People are increasingly overwhelmed by more news than they can comfortably process. Text is stitched over text to create an air of confusion, but the work is still subject to the visual constraints of pattern and the technical control involved in stitching each letter one by one.
Sara exhibits nationally and internationally and her work is in many public collections, including the Victoria & Albert Museum, the International Quilt Museum in the US and The Quilters' Guild. Her book Text in Textile Art was published in 2013 and she produced a book of her work Context: Words & Stitch in 2025.