08/10/2026
Day 12 Maker Profile is Kathy Menzie from Topeka. She is Piece #13-After the Fire. Her are her words describing her creation for the ROOTsource. I’ve lived on the edge of the Flint Hills for 40 years and I wouldn’t want to live anywhere else. Both beauty and peace are in the Flint Hills, whether it is a sun-drenched winter day or a thunderous stormy spring day. Wildflowers and prairie grasses wave in the wind in the summer and the controlled burns blanket the fields with orange flames and smoke in early spring.
I feel alive in the hills. I can feel myself reaching up, like the trees, trying to touch the sky, and growing down, planting roots in the ground. I am both grounded and free to dream and become an artist. Some of my first art quilts were of the vast rolling hills of the Flint Hills. One is of a tree that had died and was decaying, but all around the base were wildflowers, grasses, weeds and new trees. The tree may have died, but it was still nurturing new life.
I often drive around the area, looking for old barns, rusting farm equipment, grazing cows, old fences, sunflowers, coneflowers, railroad tracks and grain elevators. I love snow-covered roads, overgrown trees, and hills that seem to stretch forever. In my art quilts, I try to capture pulse of the land and the promise it brings. My quilts are textured, to simulate the grasses and ridges in the trees and the fences.
The Roots project fits exactly into the work I do. It was clear we were seeking to show not only the topography of the different areas, but the spirit of being among the hills. Just as the sections of the Flint Hills are unique, the quilters are also unique in their ideas and approaches to depicting the diversity of the land in the Kansas and Oklahoma
