For St. Augustine artist An Marshall, fabric is more than a medium. It is a way to explore identity, memory, grief and the unseen patterns that shape a human life. Marshall creates large-scale art quilts using painted and dyed fabrics, original imagery and dense layers of stitching. Some pieces contain lines of thread spaced roughly an eighth of an inch apart, with colors changing repeatedly as the image develops. The process can be painstaking, but the finished work has the visual power of a tapestry and the deeply personal quality of something made by hand. Her work is far removed from the precise geometric patterns traditionally associated with quilting. Marshall is less interested in creating points that match perfectly than she is in using textiles to communicate something meaningful.
“I don’t like math,” she says with a laugh. “When you’re working with patterns that have to have points that match exactly, that’s not me.”
Instead, she began developing her own images on fabric, allowing the material to become a canvas for ideas that felt more personal, spiritual and emotionally resonant. Marshall believes her strongest work comes from a divine source—an inner recognition that a particular image, subject or message is hers to create. If an idea does not connect to that deeper purpose, she finds it difficult to pursue, regardless of how practical or commercially appealing it may be. She recalls her husband once mentioning potential customers who might be interested in paintings of horses to hang above their sofas. Marshall briefly considered how she might approach the work and what it could earn, but the idea felt flat.
“Clearly, my derivative of artist really has to do with source or divine,” she says. “Unless they were holy horses, it’s not mine to do.”
That understanding has helped Marshall distinguish between work she could create and work she feels called to create. It also led her into a deeper study of archetypes, or recurring patterns of behavior that appear across human lives and cultures. Marshall has created work inspired by the artist, healer, guide, shaman and thief archetypes, and she is currently exploring the king. She describes archetypes as both “a mirror and a map,” offering a way to recognize the forces that influence people’s choices, fears and sense of purpose.
Rather than simply illustrating an archetype, Marshall uses the creative process to investigate how that pattern exists within her own life. Her healer piece, for example, became a way to explore the unconscious and the parts of human experience that are difficult to express through words. The labor-intensive stitching required her to remain immersed in the subject, changing thread colors and building the surface gradually.
Marshall connects deeply with textile artist Wen Redmond’s observation, “I make the art, and the art makes me.” For Marshall, that idea describes the way creating a piece can become an act of discovery. The finished work may communicate something to the viewer, but the process also changes the artist who made it.
“When I’m making the art, it’s like an embodiment that’s occurring,” she says.
Marshall believes the desire to create was present from childhood. She first expressed herself through performance, including dance, singing and music. As a young teenager, she also made a large collage depicting the ocean, a subject that remains close to her heart. She was proud of the piece, but her mother discouraged her from continuing along an artistic path and would not allow the collage to be displayed on her wall. Years later, creativity resurfaced in an unexpected way. While trying to quit smoking, she began making fabric boxes. That interest led her to a quilting class nearly 40 years ago and eventually to the narrative textile work she creates today.
Marshall also works as a real estate agent, balancing the schedules, obligations and practical demands of that career with the more intuitive experience of making art. She understands the tension many creative people feel between their responsibilities and the need to make something meaningful.
Her exploration of creativity now extends beyond her own studio. Marshall is an archetypal consultant and teaches programs focused not simply on artistic techniques, but on what she calls “the being of an artist.” While artists can easily find classes about technique, pricing, marketing and packaging, Marshall believes there is less guidance about the person who actually enters the studio. Is it the person still mentally carrying a to-do list, thinking about dinner or replaying the news? Or is it the artist who has something entirely personal to express? Marshall calls her program the Sacred Artist Journey. It is designed to help creative people reclaim what she describes as their artistic DNA and understand the motivations beneath their work.
“When everything can be run through the lens of that DNA, then it’s either a match or it’s not,” she says.
One of Marshall’s most meaningful experiences with textile art began when she was preparing to meet her future mother-in-law. She wanted to make a quilt as a gift, but a traditional pattern did not feel personal enough. Instead, Marshall began imagining a piece filled with scenes and symbols from the woman’s life: her church, the store she had owned, her former home, a map of Cape Cod and a favorite psalm. Marshall began the quilt on a Sunday evening and was still finishing it at the airport five days later. When she showed the completed piece to her husband, he cried. Somehow, she had captured the story of his mother’s life in cloth. When they arrived in Florida, his mother was alert but no longer able to speak. Marshall’s husband placed the quilt over her and began pointing out each image, recounting the places, memories and experiences stitched into the fabric. Although she could not respond verbally, she squeezed his hand as he spoke. The quilt became a way for mother and son to communicate when words were no longer available.
She died that night beneath it. When the family returned the next morning, her mother-in-law was resting beneath a piece of art that told the story of her life. That experience deepened Marshall’s understanding of what textile art could hold.
“I really get how important an image is, or how art can touch a human’s life in a way that surpasses so many other modalities,” she says. “Words just can’t touch images.”
Marshall’s belief in the emotional power of images eventually led her to create Soul Stories, an international collective of textile artists producing large-scale work centered on meaning and message. The group includes 26 artists from the United States, Canada, Hungary and the United Kingdom, many of whom are internationally recognized in the field of textile art. Marshall describes herself as being “in the company of eagles.”
The idea began with an image she felt compelled to follow. At first, she resisted the responsibility of organizing an international group and exhibition, but the vision continued to return.
“It was kind of like my marching orders,” she says. “This is me. This is for me to do.”
Soul Stories debuted in Houston and has since developed a schedule of exhibitions at museums and major textile-art venues. The work is also traveling internationally, including an appearance at a major quilt exhibition in Birmingham, England. Each artist creates an individual piece, but the collection is united by its scale, humanity and desire to address subjects that reach beyond decoration. The quilts are intended to carry meaning—stories of identity, culture, struggle, healing and shared human experience. Marshall intentionally envisioned the works at a tapestry-like scale. She sees textile art as part of a long artistic lineage, even if quilts have historically struggled to receive the same recognition as painting, sculpture and other forms of fine art.
Because quilting is often associated with functional bed coverings, some viewers overlook its potential as contemporary art. Marshall points to ancient tapestries as evidence that textiles have long been used to record stories, create beauty and transform large spaces. Soul Stories is helping continue that tradition in a modern form.
Marshall is currently completing a book about the Sacred Artist Journey and the different ways the artist archetype can appear. She is also developing a seven-foot-tall piece inspired by the king archetype for the next Soul Stories exhibition. The scale and subject have challenged her. She has had to confront the part of herself that questions whether the work is too powerful, too ambitious or simply too much. But that resistance has become part of the piece itself. When viewers eventually stand before the finished piece, they may see the light or shadow of the archetype depending on their own experiences. That is part of the exchange Marshall hopes her art will create. The work does not offer a single interpretation. It asks viewers to recognize something within themselves.
Locally, residents can see and purchase Marshall’s textile art at Art Collective St. Augustine. Her pieces invite viewers to reconsider what a quilt can be—not simply a functional object or traditional craft, but a work of fine art capable of carrying memory, spiritual inquiry and the story of a life.
