Textile artist Micaela Fitzsimmons layers fabric and thread like a painter works colour onto her canvas.  But working in textiles means colour and form can be changed instantaneously, with the flick of a swatch of blue or remnant of yellow silk. “I really like the surprise of creating with cloth and dyes, printmaking on fabrics.  You never know how the dyes are going to run and set.  It’s entirely a discovery process,” said Fitzsimmons, somewhat akin to a sculptor finding the form hidden in a block of marble.

She roams around her 600-foot studio space on the third floor of her century home in Mitchell. Colours fly off most every surface against spotless white walls. “The disadvantage is that it has sloped walls (being nestled into the roof), so I can’t hang anything there.”

“When I was about five years old my grandmother made me an immense, exquisite gown made out of an orange and yellow parachute.  I wore it the whole summer long, that giant gown,” she recalls. “My love for fabrics must have begun there. Also, at about age eight I lived in Europe and remember going through the palace at Versaille in France, especially Marie Antoinette’s bed chamber. The tapestries, the brocade patterns, the opulent stitching and designs.  They were breathtaking!”

Fitzsimmons collects older fabrics at garage sales and Goodwill – a frock made by a mother for her child in the 1940s for instance, or leftover quilt blocks that some sewer had abandoned, which Fitzsimmons carefully refashions into new quilts or works of art. Her daughter Laraina is a picker for a vintage fashion store in Toronto. “She found probably the ugliest shirt on the face of the earth covered in Picasso images. She knew the store wouldn’t want it but I would.” 

Fitzsimmons has a small collection of frayed, much-loved older quilts made by others.  By sewing traditional quilts herself, she has continued her learning.  “I’ve always been more experimental, but now I’m learning techniques and styles that I wouldn’t normally work with.” But the best part of traditional quilting is … “the leftover scraps!  I love to use leftover scraps to create spontaneous works, incorporating pieces that might not usually be put together.”  Her newest piece, Arctic Sun, started as a piece of white linen with black dye dripped down one side. “I had NO idea what it was going to be. But when I added a pop of orange to the greys it came alive. Despite myself (because I was trying to stay very abstract) it started becoming a landscape, so I gave up and let it become just that.”

She fondly refers to her stash (collection) of fabrics as “obscene”.  “I have a weakness for fabrics, either dyed by myself or patterns other people have developed.”  And the weirder the design or colour pallet, the better. “I may only buy ¼ metre because that keeps it ‘scrappy’.  Using scraps focuses on colour combinations, pattern juxtaposition, and the randomness that comes from working with small bits of fabric.” 

Fitzsimmons is intrigued with designing in grid patterns. “This can be a severe style, but very slight nuances due to the handmade nature of the work can introduce subtle movement. Things become not so static, not absolute perfection.”  One of her personal favourite works is a black, white and red quilt she made featuring U2 band t-shirts (she’s such a fan!). Rare and not-so-rare U2 shirts were sent from all over North America to benefit the Stephen Lewis Foundation, and Fitzsimmons’ resulting work raised $1,000. Fitzsimmons is trying to determine if a new direction is coming.  “I’m thinking ‘Inside Out’ – beginning with a core and moving out from that core, conceptually or literally with visual design.”

Her day persona is Collection Manager and Exhibit Coordinator at the Stratford Perth Museum, where she has worked since 2009.  She catalogues and cares for the artifacts in the collection and works with the rest of the staff to develop exhibits.  In mid-April 2013, their current display of signature quilts will be replaced by local contemporary quilts made by those who live in, or have been inspired by, the “Birds and Bees and Flowers and Trees” of Perth County, supplemented with nature-themed wood carvings.

Fitzsimmons is a member of three local quilting groups gathered in Mitchell, Stratford and Kirkton.  “Each gives me a different focus and inspiration.”  She also belongs to the international organization SAQA (Studio Art Quilts Associates).  One of her small African silhouettes toured for two years with SAQA, then was chosen to reside in the permanent collection of the Great Lakes Quilt Center at Michigan State University.
As well, she attended the arts-endowed New Trier High School, north of Chicago, then spent one summer at the Bournemoth School of the Arts in Bournemoth, England.  She studied at the Kansas City Art Institute for a year, worked for five years as a University of Toronto researcher, then spent eight years raising her family in Martinique in the Caribbean. They resettled in Oakville, Ontario, next door to Sheridan College where she took their Interior Design program.  Fitzsimmons studied Surface Design for four months at the Haliburton School for the Arts, and later completed a Fine Art and Textile History degree at the University of Waterloo.  In 2009 she completed Fleming College’s Museum Management and Curatorship program.

A large number of her works have been influenced by African life and textiles. Her interest in them developed at the time of the Massey Lectures by Stephen Lewis, which profiled the devastation in Africa because of AIDS. A friend had returned from Zimbabwe with photos of children.  Fitzsimmons turned these into silhouettes, which “removed individual identity and yet makes it more possible to find a personal connection – to find ourselves in the silhouettes.”  Settling and The Road Home were shown over the last two years at Gallery Stratford’s Huron Perth Exhibitions. Her artist statement for Settling says her work is a response to “the faceless anonymity of statistics. The repetition of silhouette images are used throughout as a pervasive symbol of the displaced person – the wanderer, the refugee. Silhouettes also suggest a common humanity and we are challenged to consider the individual behind the statistics.  Simple house shapes protect some figures, not all.”​

Her works have also been displayed at the Tom Thompson Art Gallery in Owen Sound, the Joseph Schneider House in Kitchener and in the Fall of 2012 at the World of Threads exhibition in Oakville, while she concurrently was helping the Fibre Content show in Burlington to develop and install exhibitions and put out their catalogue.

  “It would be wonderful to make a living with my art, but really, I just want them to be seen, particularly the ones that have a message contained in them.”

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See Micaela's work here, including Settling and The Road Home.​