Meet Moira

Meet Chicago textile artist and TurboTax customer, Moira Quinn.

Being an artist is the most irrational thing you can do. You have the drive to do this, and you don’t know why, except that you know you must, in spite of every reason not to.

My name is Moira Quinn. I’m a textile artist. I’m obsessed with rugs. I live in Chicago, Illinois. I studied textiles at the Art Institute of Chicago and it was the first thing in my life that I felt like I understood completely. With textiles, there’s weavings, there’s printing, there’s stitching. And I’ve always been obsessed with drawing.

Rugs are very pictorial. Seeing a rug through from the sketchbook to the design phase to the execution of the piece itself, for me, it’s a lot like falling in love.

I become obsessed with an idea and I can’t stop thinking about it. It consumes me until I finally see it through on the loom and only then can I rest easy.

The city plays a huge role in my process. I work at a vintage store where I see a lot of textiles, a lot of fashion history, and they are constantly leaking into my mind. I bring that to my drawings, my rugs, my textiles.

Artists are not great with money. And anything that makes me think about money is really draining. Anxiety about taxes is something that I can put on the back burner just a little bit because of advances in technology and software.

TurboTax is the only software that partners up with bookkeeping. It completely changed how we operate our businesses at home. And anything that makes me think about money even a little bit less helps me focus in the studio because I truly cannot have any interference from reality.

I think the last few years have shown that social media is a poor substitute for human interaction and human appreciation of art. I’ve been adjusting my priorities to be more human focused.

I want to be around people and talk to them about my work and their work. Our life is our art and I feel happy every day that I’ve made the choices that I have and that I’ve prioritized fun and partnership and art over everything else.