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Jan Lanahan was born and raised in Australia, where she met her husband, who was serving in the U.S. Air Force. While living in Germany in the 1980s, she saw a Grandmother’s Flower Garden quilt in a magazine and decided to make one. When they were later living in Phoenix, Arizona, she became fascinated with Native American arts and taught herself spinning, dyeing, weaving, and coiled basketry. She continues to enjoy quilting and these other textile arts.
"Baskets, especially corn baskets, were so important to early man that the Native Americans raised this utilitarian object to an art form. This quilt is an original design that evolved after finishing another quilt in which I used Seminole patchwork in rows to represent layers of earth. It hit me that I could ‘build’ Native American basket designs using this technique. I used natural fiber and fabrics to make row after row of tiny Seminole patchwork and added a group of coiled baskets in the center, hand-painted with dyes. The brown background is the red soil of the Southwest."