Elaine O’Neil’s gallery on display at UNC Cancer Hospital

Chapel Hill resident Elaine O’Neil didn’t know her textile career would take her from crafting curtains and tents to giraffes and barbeque huts.

“I thought I would be designing fabrics,” said O’Neil, who once expected she’d use her textile design degree in a career in New York. “Things happen in life with getting married and having children.”

But when a friend with a gallery invited O’Neil to make a few pieces for an upcoming art show, she found a talent for turning fabrics into masterpieces.

“I did a couple pieces with textiles, and they all sold in the opening reception,” she said. “That was kind of a nice way to say, ‘Hey maybe I can make a career of this.’”

O’Neil calls her work textile collage, and she creates her pieces by layering fabric with different textures, colors and shapes.

“Like a painter uses paint, I use fabric and thread and my sewing machine,” O’Neil said.

O’Neil’s work now brightens the walls of the N.C. Cancer Hospital as a permanent installation. Her 12 pieces were installed in the hospital at a ceremony Jan. 21 in memory of a man treated there.

“It started as this fundraising project for the cancer hospital, and it ended up as kind of a dedication or a celebration of somebody’s life,” she said.

The pieces, which depict images like the Tobacco Road rivalry, NASCAR and the Durham Bulls Athletic Park, were originally created for a 2011 calendar sold to benefit the UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center.

In September, Carolyn Goldfinch saw O’Neil’s pieces and expressed interest in keeping them as a collection in honor of her husband, John, who passed away of pancreatic cancer.

Goldfinch and O’Neil were neighbors, and O’Neil said she knew Goldfinch’s husband well.

“It was kind of serendipitous the way it worked,” O’Neil said.

Goldfinch approached Debbie Dibbert, director of external affairs at the cancer center, asking to make a gift for the art.

With help from family and friends, Goldfinch purchased the pieces and donated them to the hospital.

“The calendar almost doesn’t do justice to her pieces because you can’t see the fabric, and you can’t see the detail,” Dibbert said. “If you can really get up next to it, you can see how intricate they really are and the amount of creativity and the effort that has gone into these pieces.”

O’Neil said depicting memories is a common theme in her work, and many of her pieces illustrate scenes from Chapel Hill and UNC.

“A lot of my work focuses around a sense of place, where good things and happy memories have happened,” O’Neil said. “When you’re in the cancer hospital, you need to think about those happy times too.”

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