Karin Olah is on the phone, not from Charleston where her fiber art collages first drew notice but from a small town in Colorado where she's on working sabbatical with her husband, a solar power expert, their newborn daughter and a dog named Joby. She's just back from a family trek along mountain streams that could provide further inspiration, however she's gently adamant that Charleston remains home and the source of her artistic illumination. Olah became an emerging Charleston artist as she refined a process she calls "fabric-collage-paintings," often employing "retired" fabrics to highlight her paintings. She's won awards, been the source of magazine profiles and has been showing her singular works throughout the South including Charleston's Corrigan Gallery. She's preparing for an upcoming show in Pennsylvania and continues to work on new abstracts and fiber/painted pairings while tending to an expanding family out West. She sounds focused and content, and while Olah remains uncertain about when she'll return to Charleston, she maintains it's just a matter of time.

This month, mixed-media artist Karin Olah is leaving the Lowcountry for Boulder, Colorado. To say farewell, SCOOP Studios is hosting "Unwound and Bound," showing some 20 of her latest works from August 5 to 27. While all are created using her signature layering of textiles with gouache, acrylic, and graphite, half of the pieces were directly inspired by the plant world. "In this series, I express the petals of magnolia and orchid blossoms with silk and cotton and patchwork imaginary bouquets," she says. In the other half, "I let the organic shapes learned from my first series transform into abstract studies." View the fresh creations during the August 5 opening reception from 5 to 8 p.m.

Karin Olah has just a few weeks left in her cheerful, fabric-filled studio at the Redux Contemporary Art Center. For the last hour, she's been standing over a canvas topped with layers of fabric shapes, rearranging them until they seem just right. "I just make it up as I go," she says of her art. "It's fun playing with intuition and moving all the shapes around. I've been moving shapes around on this unfinished piece deciding if the highlights are going to be right. It's funny to find highlights on an object that doesn't exist. I'm not working from a still-life. I'm making it up as I go." Since moving to Charleston in 2003, Olah has developed a unique brand of fiber art that combines printmaking, quilt-making, collage-work, and painting. Over the years she's refined her process, creating various series inspired by the shapes and colors of Charleston. At the end of the month, she'll say goodbye to the Holy City to move to Colorado with her husband.

Karin Olah is in love. With fabric. Growing up in the heart of Amish country in Lititz, Pennsylvania, Olah was moved by the beauty and art in the Amish's quilt making. To her the quilt is literally a work of art that brings both beauty and comfort into the owner's life, and that is exactly what her work does. A decade ago, Olah was painting on fabric at her studio during the day and picking up needle and thread to quilt at night, but neither felt quite right. She took the best part of each project and brought them together in her paintings with fabric. The process is very intensive, with lots of planning, thought and preparation before she even starts cutting out shapes to create the collages. Like a quilt, there is a lot of handwork, thought and time in each piece.

Four years after Charleston magazine gave her an Under the Radar Emerging Artist award for creative, interesting, and still undiscovered art, mixed-media artist Karin Olah has become a fixture on the local art scene. Her fluid, colorful quilts-on-canvas are now hanging in homes and galleries across the country and have appeared in magazines such as American Contemporary Artist and Art Business News. Peek into her fabric-filled studio at Redux Contemporary Art Center, and it's easy to see how her success today reflects the colors of her past.

Karin Olah began her presentation by giving a brief history of quilt-making complete with pictures. She became fascinated with the art growing up in Lancaster, Pennsylvania near Amish communities, where quilt making is one of the only creative outlets for women. After a brief stint working for a textile studio in New York City, Olah eventually moved to Charleston, where she began working with fabrics on paper. She took the principles of quilt-making and fused them with painting. Her work has since evolved into a series of beautifully intricate pieces using various forms of fabric, including menÕs business shirts from the '70s (thanks to Olah's father), charcoal, thread, and other materials. Her exhibit at Redux is like a garden of fabric growing against a wall, composed of flowerbox-like canvases with floral inspired shapes, and stems, which run onto the gallery walls. With their flowing collages of shapes and colors, Olah views her work as a further collaboration onto the history of quilt-making.

Revelation Of Process: Karin Olah

Her mostly-abstract collages have always been visually interesting and well-crafted, but in this show her art flowers. Rather than staying within the rectangle, she has just gone right off onto the wall linking several of the individual pieces with fabric that flows like rivers across the walls.

Her works look like paintings from a distance, but when you get up close, you realize that the brushstrokes are cut pieces of fabric, intricately layered to appear like paint. Her pieces in this exhibition are fun and vibrant and literally jump off the canvases.

Karin Olah's inspiration is drawn from quiltmaking. She cuts strips of fabric to resemble brushtrokes and then uses them to depict the architecture, geography, and atmosphere around her — her swirls of color and cloth are an extension of the feeling she gets when she sees sky reflected on water or downtown buildings clustered together.

Olah manipulates cut portions of fabric and paint onto canvas, rendering collage images with movement that suggests clothes fluttering on a line at the beach house, but with a soothing, calm palette of blues, grays, and creams that might suit a wintery afternoon on that same coast. One could just say that her collages are breezy and cool, which would make sense in light of these paintings' indefinable hint of a mid-century modern aesthetic. So cleanly and neatly does Olah arrange each canvas that the tactile quality of the fabric swatches is apparent only up close. So don't glance at these works online and assume you've seen this all before.

Currently on view at the Dobbs Gallery in Birmingham, Alabama are new fabric collages by Karin Olah. The Dobbs Gallery is a new space in Birmingham, devoted to showing work of established and emerging contemporary artists. The exhibition, titled Arrivals, cleverly marks the artist first solo exhibition with the gallery as well as a new body of work. Olah has gained a reputation in the SouthEast for her fabric collages which attempt to mimic elements of the natural world through the formal vocabulary of line, form, color and space. Olah's work responds to the history of textiles and quilt making by using fabric to mimic the line and texture of paint.

Olah is a graduate of the Maryland Institute College of Art, in Baltimore with a major in Fiber Arts and currently lives and works in Charleston, South Carolina. She was recently included in the publications American Contemporary Art and Art Business News. Recent exhibitions have included works in the South Carolina State Museum, Redux Contemporary Art Center and Eva Carter Gallery in Charleston, South Carolina, as well as the Torpedo Factory Art Center in Alexandria, Virginia.

According to Karin Olah, her art falls into many categories. "It can be described as painting, collage art, or fiber art," she says. Her work is also informed by "graffiti art, calligraphy and cursive handwriting, fashion, and language." Olah works on canvas, linen, and paper creating her signature collage paintings as a way to connect with America's quilt making heritage....

A native of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, Olah's medium of choice pays homage to the traditional quilt making of her Amish hometown and puts to good use her degree in Fiber Art from the Maryland Institute College of Art. She went on to master the possibilities of fabric while working in New York City for a textile studio that creates colors and patterns fro designers such as Donna Karan, Marc Jacobs, and Ralph Lauren. Abstraction, however, has always been her true love.

Olah's colors and designs suggest—in a very loose and inviting way—the commercial illustrations of the late 1950s and early 1960s, when magazine covers, dust jackets for best sellers, and advertisements for soft drinks, motion pictures, and automobiles found a middle ground between the purely figurative and the wholly abstract. It's hard to say how or why Olah's completely abstract designs evoke those kinds of illustrations, but they certainly do. If one of her works is seen in the background of an episode of the new season of "Mad Men," no one will blink an eye.

Karin Olah’s style is a tangible patchwork of her experiences. From a small-town upbringing in Lancaster County, Pa., her interest in Amish quilts and textile traditions led her to study fiber art at Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. For several years following art school, Olah worked in Manhattan, concocting colors and patterns for fashion designers. She now applies her fabric know-how to the realm of painting..

The dominant artist in this show is Karin Olah, whose mixed media works are vibrant, colorful and vivacious abstractions. Compositionally based on circles and curlicues, they possess a voluptuous carefree feeling. It is a bit like the pleasures of a colorful bubble bath. Using fabric, gouache, acrylic and graphite, she paints and pastes curvilinear shapes into visual delights.

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