Your Red Cross Update

By: Crystal Reiss, American Red Cross Volunteer

“I’m trying to make order out of chaos.”

Artist and Retired Nurse, Gail DeMartis

Giving Back and Finding Renewal

When the sky rained sparks over Paradise on November 8, 2018, igniting the Camp Fire, California’s deadliest wildfire to date, few could have guessed it would also reignite a creative flame in artist and retired nurse Gail DeMartis. Her encounter with Paradise began after the fire killed 85 people and incinerated 95 percent of the town’s buildings, when the need for support remained high. Already experienced as a Red Cross volunteer in the blood services sector, DeMartis leaped at the chance to join the Red Cross Disaster Response team for two weeks.

This first experience of working with fellow team members at a shelter and engaging closely with the people who lost everything in Paradise had a profound impact on her. It not only kicked off numerous future disaster response deployments, from California to Kentucky and back, but it also led to the creation of a work of art that would take eight years to complete.

Recently, she recalled what it was like to experience the chaos and extreme conditions that overtook people’s lives after the devastation of the fire. “People went back to their properties and found the remains of their missing animals. It was just so painful. There was a lot of loss of life, but people were able to count their blessings, and that was really moving.”

Working long hours, she drew upon her adventurous and spunky nature, and her skills as a former inpatient psychiatric nurse, to meet the enormous need. “I worked in the women’s shelter; I think we had about 70 people staying there.” For two weeks, she eased emotional pain while finding creative approaches to help people rebuild, reconnect and recover, an act of giving back that she would replicate during subsequent disaster response missions.

Not long after her encounter with Paradise, she recalled, “Someone asked me to make a drawing of a time in my life when I felt comfortable in my stride.” This question ultimately initiated an eight-year sewing saga. After some consideration, she realized that “working at the shelter in Paradise was so similar to the job that I had left several years prior (as a nurse) that I chose that experience and did a drawing of it. And then I said, ‘Now I’m going to make a quilt out of it.’”

The drawing was wild, chaotic, aflame with “a bunch of arrows going in all different directions, little rectangles for the cots, little circles for the people. But there was something about it that really worked,” she said. Like DeMartis’s roundabout journey as an artist and the time it has taken many of those in Paradise to rebuild, the quilt took a circuitous route, carving its own path and taking the years it needed to be completed.

The Art of Renewal

For DeMartis, creating art began well before her life as a nurse. She moved to the Bay Area from New Jersey to attend the San Francisco Art Institute, where she could engage with her creativity. But after art school, the reality of paying for life hit, and she “did a bit of a 180,” she recalled. “I thought, ‘I need to do something that’s going to actually provide me with a career.’”

Fortunately, DeMartis found a new vocation as a psychiatric nurse, where chaotic environments were sometimes the norm and giving back to people facing difficulties became a meaningful mission. However, the tug of creative expression never left her. “I got pregnant, and like so many people who start quilting, I thought, ‘I’m going to make a quilt for my baby.’” That was the beginning of an ever-expanding journey into textiles. “Almost all my days off, I spent sewing or taking classes.”

By the time DeMartis completed the Paradise quilt in 2026, she had mastered the art form. It had been a journey of stops and starts as the quilt drove her in a new direction, one that incorporated recycled cloth including strips from old shirts and reflective fabrics friends dropped off at her sewing studio. “I tried to put shiny things in there because there were a lot of shiny moments. I think all my arrows are silver and there’s a lot of silk. There are a lot of beautiful things in there: people’s ties, people’s jeans. I hope people can see old stuff and diversity and beautiful and funky things.”

Last April, art lovers had a chance to get up close and admire the quilt at a show curated by an old San Francisco Art Institute friend at San Francisco’s art gallery, American Messenger. It hung on the wall as a bright force, bringing order and renewal to the chaos and destruction that only a master of fabric and thread with a nurse’s heart could create.