Greg Climer: Quilting, the high-tech way

Greg Climer’s pixelated quilts are captivating, colourful portraits enabled through the use of technology, which he uses to augment a traditional craft into something truly modern and exciting.

His quilts are designed by taking photographic images or collages and converting them into a pixelated form, blurring the image without obscuring it. The pixel images are then digitally printed onto cotton, ready for construction into a quilt using traditional techniques. Alongside working on his quilts he creates ‘knitted films’ through the painstakingly slow process of recreating reels of film in knitted form, frame by frame, which he then re-animates into video format.

Greg holds a BA in theatre design and classical studies and an MFA in Design Technology. He started off as a pattern maker for costume design in theatre, then moved into the fashion industry. Currently, as a practising artist, he mixes his signature style of quilting and knitting with the use of technology. Greg is also an Assistant Professor at the Parsons School of Design, New York and was artist in residence at Museum of Art and Design, New York in 2016. His work has been shown in galleries around the US and is in the permanent collection of the Leslie Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art.

In this interview Greg shares how his career developed from learning to sew as a child. He talks about his promotion of equality and gay rights through his work. Find out how he’s driven by his love of innovation, to use high-tech approaches within a traditional craft. He explains in detail how he constructs his playful quilt portraits and shares his advice on how to push your boundaries by using ideas from outside of your field to become more experimental with your processes.