Carrefour European Quilt Show, Sainte-Marie-Aux-Mines, France September 2025
- loisparishevans
- Oct 14
- 4 min read
Now that we've been home a week I've had a chance to catch my breath and reflect on the amazing experience of being a Guest of Honour at the Carrefour European Quilt Show in 2025. What that means - in 2025 Oceania (Australia and New Zealand) was the focus region for the Show and Oceania quilters and textile artists were invited to submit a proposal to exhibit at EPM. I feel privileged that my proposal was accepted and consequently I had the opportunity to travel to France with my husband, John, and participate in this amazing event. We also took the opportunity to do a little traveling in France and cross off a couple of my bucket list places which I will probably blog about on another occassion.
In 2024 I was also privileged to be a mentee in the Creative Bay Of Plenty Mentor program and what I took from the program was how important being able to exhibit is for me. Since acknowledging this fact I have been incredibly busy with exhibitions, culminating so far, in an exhibition at the Carrefour Quilt Show in France. It is definitely a highlight of my creative journey thus far….
As most of you will appreciate, an incredible amount of work goes into creating an exhibition, many months of planning, working on pieces and finally curating an exhibition that one hopes will be interesting and enjoyable. It requires courage, confidence and allowing oneself to feel vulnerable – after all who is to say that everyone - or anyone - will like my work?! It was certainly a stepping outside my comfort zone and I had to arrive at a point where I knew I was doing this because I believe it is the next step for me in my journey...Que sera sera...What will be, will be.
Not having been to the Carrefour Quilt Show before and having only a short time spent in France previously it was difficult to know what to expect. However my experience of the Show far exceeded any expectations I might have had. An incredibly intense but amazing four days, 9-6pm each day. The Show attracted 17000 visitors, we were told the first few days would be frantically busy but that it would slow down a little on the last two days. This was accurate except that the last two days were still very, very busy. I was so grateful to have my husband, John, with me. I could not have done it without his help and support.
People came from many countries:- Germany, Switzerland, Belgium, Holland, the Netherlands, Italy, Spain, the USA, the Uk, Australia, NZ... to name a few...and Google Translate became my best friend. Many people had more English than I had French or German or anyone other language and my most common phrase was “parle Anglaise?” - speak English? It was still possible to have great conversations and the most common word I heard was “Magnifique”, all feedback was extremely positive. By far the most encouraging feedback is when someone likes a quilt enough to take it home...One of my favourite stories is the lady who bought a landscape quilt because 70 years ago she came to NZ as an exchange student and “Afternoon Shadows” transported her back to that time…. Actually I loved having the opportunity to meet nearly all of the people who were seriously interested in my work, it is not something that happens very often in galleries.
And for someone who prefers to be behind the camera lens one of my biggest learning curves was to feel Ok about having my photo taken......
John was happy for me to have some time off to go and see some other exhibits but unfortunately it was not so easy as they were spread out over 4 villages, and as he said to me “the visitors to your exhibit want to talk to you”. I did get to see a number of exhibitions close to my exhibition space, which was a treat. I was also fortunate to be in the exhibition space that housed the 30 finalists in the Avante-Garde challenge and one other solo exhibitor, Mattea Jurin, from Italy.
There were many special moments and another was finding a group of school students who came and sat on the floor in front of my Under The Canopy 3 & 4 and proceeded to draw and another group who went to another section of my exhibition and also drew from my exhibition.
One of the highlights for me was how accepted quilting and the textile arts are in the European culture, there were many people who weren’t quilters or textile artists and yet they came because of the reputation of the Carrefour Quilt Show. Another highlight was the opportunity to showcase an exhibition of my creative work to an international audience... there may be opportunities that come out of the exhibition, only time will tell whether any of them are realised. I have no doubt that there is much more I could blog about hopefully this gives you a little idea of what was an amazing experience which will be remembered for a long time to come.
