Joy Saville is internationally recognized for her uniquely constructed, impressionistic pieced quilts, which are represented in the collections of the Museum of Arts & Design, the Newark Museum, the International Quilt Study Center & Museum, and numerous private and corporate collections, including the John M. Walsh III Collection of Contemporary Art Quilts; Time Warner Inc./HBO, H. J. Heinz, and the 71st St & Lexington Corporation in New York City; Bristol-Myers, Squibb in Princeton, New Jersey; Pepsico; the Treesdale Country Club in Pittsburgh; and Ropes & Gray in Boston. She also has created commissioned pieces for the Nassau Presbyterian Church and the Princeton Jewish Center in Princeton; Johnson & Johnson in New Brunswick, New Jersey; and many private collectors.

Saville explains that for the past thirty years, the focus of her work has been color."That is where each work begins, with the choosing of color. Something I have seen or experienced... in nature, landscape, theater, art, etc. has prompted a need to capture the essence and to visually say so. From the time the colors are chosen I begin to cut and piece, cut and piece... each work having its own way of coming together and evolving. With the concept in mind, there seems to be an inherent characteristic and direction that unfolds during the process of combining the colors and working with the different fabrics. If I can see and feel this quality of rightness or essentialness at each stage of the construction process, I know I will be satisfied with the results... and am on the right track. It is a building process that involves me intellectually, physically and spiritually.

"Being curious about the properties and possibilities of my materials and tools has led me to develop a piecing process that is unconventional and unique. This process allows me to focus on color and form in the composition, instead of the usual repetition of pattern found in traditional piecework."

Art critic Ed McCormack, the Managing Editor of Gallery & Studio magazine, noted: “On encountering work as formally animated and coloristically subtle as Saville’s, one is still sorely tempted to tout it as ‘painterly,’ since the manner in which Saville employs myriad small, discrete shapes cut from colorful cotton, linen and silk could be likened to how the Impressionists employed strokes of oil pigments placed next to each other, rather than blended, to evoke an optical sensation of light. Nor would it seem entirely inaccurate to compare Saville’s sharp, cascading shards of color to those of the second-generation Abstract Expressionist painter Robert Goodnough, since both artists, in their different ways, update the structural vocabulary of Cubism, albeit unbound by that movement’s literal references and muddy austerity.”