has long been recognized as one of the United Kingdom's premier textile artists, and she also is one of the few European artists who have been an important force in the American art quilt movement.
Over her thirty-five year career, Burbidge's work has been exhibited worldwide and examples have been purchased by a number of major museums of the UK, including the Victoria & Albert Museum, the National Museums of Scotland, the Ulster Folk & Transport Museum in Belfast, the Whitworth Art Gallery, in Manchester, and the Glasgow Museums. She is also represented in major collections in the USA, including the International Quilt Study Center & Museum, and the John M. Walsh III Collection of Contemporary Art Quilts, and has won numerous commissions, grants and awards, including the British Craft Council's John Ruskin Craft Award and a major grant from the Scottish Arts Council.
Originally from Dorset, England, Pauline now lives in the Scottish Borders with her husband, the sculptor Charles Poulsen. The beautiful. unspoiled country around her influences and inspires her textile work, which she says has "grown out of a passion for the countryside, linked with a love of fabric, stitching, drawing, collage, painting, colour, and traditional patchwork quilts."
In recent years, Pauline's studio quilts have explored the natural world in a variety of ways. Some, like Paxton Study II, are freely cut collages that continue her study of water and reflections. Others, including Honesty Quilt, encapsulate natural objects—in this case seeds from the honesty plant—in plastic that is arranged in imitation of block style patchwork and stitched into the layers of the quilt. The English quilter, textile researcher and historian Celia Eddy explains that the quilt surfaces are "covered with thin plastic of the sort used to cover library books. This is not the only innovation in her materials: blocks are constructed by building up patterns using pressed flowers and petals before being sealed under the plastic, after which the whole surface is hand-quilted. The effect is of great subtlety of colour and texture, enhanced by the reflected light of the shiny surface."
Still others recent quilts, such as Applecross Quilt, are evocative monochromatic landscape studies that suggest natural forms via detailed layers of stitching.
Of her recent work, Pauline says, " I am constantly trying to work more freely with my fabric and stitching, which continues to be a challenge to me, and moves my work further away from its traditional beginnings and the hard-edged piecing of my earlier quiltwork, and brings it closer to my heart."
