Strips and strings

Instead of following a pattern in her work, Mary Lee Bendolph often uses her intuition: “I say I’m going to cut out a quilt like something I see. I start it, but when I end up, I always got it going another way.” This quilt is an example of one such “my way” quilt, free from the restrictions of a standard pattern. Although a quilt is inherently a flat object, Bendolph creates a sense of depth and perspective on the right side of this composition, where a framed passage seems to recede into the distance. —Lauren Palmor