Quilter Jane Burch Cochran '65 lives with her husband, Randy, four large dogs, and five cats in an old log cabin in Rabbit Hash, Ky., population 200. But if her Southern voice and sociable manner evoke images of a small town sewing bee, think again.

Although she collects traditional quilts, and has even sewn a few herself, Cochran has made her name with "art quilts": true visual delights that were never meant to cover a bed. Her work has its roots in Victorian crazy quilts, but also the Native American beadwork she learned to love during trips out West.

Like more traditional quilters, she starts with scraps of fabric pieced together, but then adds beads and buttons, paint, sequins, and such found objects as ladies' gloves, baby dresses, and school prize ribbons, in a kaleidoscope of color and shape that makes clear her formal art training.

"Jane Cochran is one of the best," says Robert Shaw, an art historian who's written two definitive books on quilts of all kinds. "She's in the top twenty of art quilters, but also in the top of quilters as a whole."

Her work has appeared in shows nationwide, from the American Craft Museum in New York City to the San Francisco Craft Museum in California, as well as in Europe and Japan. She's won National Endowment for the Arts and other fellowships. And Quilt National-the most influential art quilt show of all-has included her work in the last six of its biannual exhibitions. (How competitive is Quilt National? The 1993 show drew 1,100 entries for just 84 places.)

"I always wanted to go to New York, but the painting world was just so angst ridden and so esoteric, and at the time it was really hard to get shown," she says. "The art quilt world is an exciting and growing field, plus fiber is probably the only art or craft field that has always been dominated by women.

"Of course now you don't have to go to New York to be a recognized artist," she adds.

Despite her success as a fiber artist, Cochran never lost her love for painting and drawing. For the last 15 years, she's met once a week to draw with a circle of friends. And she still maintains the Cincinnati loft studio that she's rented since 1972.

Born in Louisville, Cochran grew up in the Northeast, where her father's job with Ford had taken the family. When it came time for college, she decided to follow her mother, Mildred James Burch ' 37, to Centre. There she found a lively art program and a chance to use her problem-solving skills with a double major in art and math. Her dream was the Big Apple, but first she needed to earn some money.

"Because of the Vietnam war, it was really an interesting time for a woman," she recalls. "If you had math skills, jobs were a dime a dozen." So Cochran became an actuary-in-training for a life insurance company, taught school, and held a series of other jobs, while studying at the Cincinnati Art Academy at night.When a friend offered a partnership in a costume jewelry business she thought, "why not?" At least she'd be doing something somewhat creative. More important, it got her used to the scary concept of working for herself.

It wasn't until after she married, however, that she found a way to combine her day job with her art habit. "We lived in a little bitty house in the country, and I liked to have something small to work on at home," she explains. "I started using small squares of painted canvas and adding beadwork and incorporating different fabrics. At the time I didn't know there was such a thing as art quilts."

In 1985, her first full-sized work, Crazy Quilt for a Half-Breed, was accepted for the prestigious Quilt National exhibition. By 1987, her work was the cover of the Quilt National program. "It was a big turnaround for me," she says. "I used to have to go into a gallery and ask people to show my work. Since Quilt National, I've been asked to be in more shows than I can keep up with. So now I work on deadlines."

A full-time artist for the last 20 years, Cochran's quilts are slow and labor-intensive. Each large quilt can be up to seven feet long and takes some three months to complete. She usually works on just one at a time. Indeed, she admits, often a looming deadline is all that convinces her she's finished stitching a piece.

Some art quilters save time with glue but not Cochran. Every bugle bead and applique is painstakingly sewn on by hand. "I strive to make my pieces [have the form and composition you look for in] art, but still keep within the craftsmanship of the quilt," she says. "I'm not trying to be above the quilt tradition."

One of the more distinctive aspects of her work is its narrative quality. Gloves become hands reaching for answers; cast-off garments and personal mementoes are common elements, as are the flowers and vines of the natural world (she's also an enthusiastic gardener).

"Jane is one of a couple of handfuls of art quilters who have forged a recognizable style," says the art historian Robert Shaw. "Her quilts don't look like anybody else's."

And, he adds, "I'm drawn to Jane's quilts because unlike a lot of art quilters, she doesn't push a message."

Which is not to say, she doesn't have one. In Looking for God, the beaded head of her yellow lab Belle (featured on this month's Centrepiece cover) provides the central image inside a frame of such names as Large Marge and Marie V. Beagle collected from the dogs of family and friends. There's a herbaceous canopy, a heavenly blue background, even a ghostly face potholder that represents the unknown. Why the title? "What is God spelled backwards?" she says.

The quilt has beauty and wit, but it also became a healing quilt for Cochran. After a year during which she lost two close friends to cancer, including Kaye Thompson '66, and completed a quilt for the show "Sewing Comfort Out of Grief" for the children killed in the Oklahoma City bombing, she needed to laugh.

"I had fun, fun, fun making this quilt," she admits. "I even said aloud, 'I don't care if anyone likes this quilt. I like it.'"

Cochran's favorite piece of the 80 or so that she's done is called The Last Dance. The quilt includes a fluffy pink dress, with glove hands holding a mask face on a stick and four ominous blackbirds. "I like a contrast, and I like to give work an edge, by which I mean something not predictable," she says in explaining the blackbirds.

Her current project is for a quilt show honoring 45 great chefs. Her assignment is to portray Kathy Cary, the renowned owner of Lilly's restaurant in Louisville. Kelly Reed '67 suggested Cochran request Lilly's chef. "You won't be sorry, I promise," Reed told her. And she's not. "It's really fun," she says.

Cochran has kept a few of her small, early pieces, but her large quilts are either in shows or on other people's walls. Does she find it hard to give them up? Not at all, she replies. "My quilt For All Our Grandmothers had a paintbrush and a hospital service pin that belonged to my two grandmothers, and I could have taken them off. But a woman bought it to hang outside her daughter's bedroom, and it made me feel good that this little girl would grow up with this piece of art. I don't have children to pass the medal and things on to. If I kept them, they would just stay in a drawer."

Her belief that the more personal an artist's work is, the more it has to say, underlies all she does. "My goal would be to have some of my work have the feeling that Pete Seegar's songs do," she says. "To last over time, to be sometimes humorous, sometimes serious, sometimes very simple and sometimes profound and universal."

- D.F.J.

Centrepiece
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