Quilts: Connections & Tunnel Vision

The Chilean Salt flats were hugely inspiring to me and I lost count of the number of ideas I had from my visit as well as the number of yards of fabric that I printed and dyed in pursuit of those ideas.

One of those ideas and one of those yards of fabric have been used to create the 'Connections' quilt below, which I have submitted to the 2018 Festival of Quilts. The lines represent marks and shapes in the salt flat landscapes.  The subtle marks on the background cloth are created using the angular shape of the salt crystals and then liquid dye hand painted on top. 

Connections = 103cm  x 63cm

My artist statement explains the title: 'Marks in a landscape connect us to its history. Away from that landscape, images of those marks have the power to re-connect us to the emotions we felt when we were there'. I felt a real buzz when I was there and I am easily taken back when I see one of my pieces.

Connections - detail

Then for a big change of approach, I made a small quilt - Tunnel Vision. This quilt references Nancy Holt's Sun Tunnels, which are situated in the desert in Utah. The image in the middle is a picture of my much larger piece Desert Blue.

24 x 30 cm

My artist statement: 'The Atacama Desert has inspired my work for some time now. The centre of this quilt is reproduced from one of my other Atacama inspired pieces. Is it time to look for a new source of inspiration?' And the answer to that is Yes! It is time to move to a new source of inspiration as most of my ideas have been realised and now I'm starting to work with some inspiration closer to home.

I'm off to the Quilt Show on Saturday and I'm always a little nervous when I have work included. Will the quilts have travelled ok? Will they be hanging properly? I hope so.

Preparing to pack and send the quilts did solve a mystery that has been bugging me for about 18 months now. In 2013 I made a red and grey piece Gridlock II, a red & grey piece of work that I thought would add a bit of colour to one of the walls in my new kitchen. It seemed that it was nowhere to be found. The loft was searched several times, how could a big piece of work mounted on a canvas frame be lost? When I was looking for a tube to send my quilts off in, I found the piece inside a tube....not stretched over a canvas after all. After all that fretting over the lost red piece, the grey piece I also found in the tube looked better in the space!

For some time now, I've thought I should record details of my finished pieces and I think this experience will spur me on to actually do it. I think my blog will serve as a handy reminder of what I've created. 

Xenotopia IV

I've finished another piece of work in my Xenotopia series. I had a clear vision of the look and feel I wanted for the HUE exhibition and it took a lot of printing and dyeing to achieve it but in the process I created a number of pieces that didn't made the cut and this is the story of one of those pieces. 

61 cm x 92 cm

After spending a lot of time dyeing and printing this fabric I got to the point where I realised that it was never going to be the fabric I was looking for and so with nothing to lose I decided to over dye it with a view to using it in other pieces. The only problem was that I liked the resulting fabric so much that I couldn't bear to cut it up and despite it's darkness, the pattern inspired by the salt crystals was still coming through. So I decided to use it to create a piece in a similar style to Xenotopia I .

The fabric along the horizon line was something I had printed years ago and was the first fabric I'd used in this series that wasn't inspired by the salt flats but it does show that all those bits of fabric will (hopefully) come in useful one day. 

It wasn't my plan to enter a piece for the RA summer exhibition but I couldn't resist after reading the message from Grayson Perry encouraging artists to apply, especially as Grayson has created textile pieces himself. But this week I heard that it hadn't been accepted but then I always knew it was a long shot but you've got to be in it to win it.

I'm going to try and make a floating frame for this piece. I've thought about making one before but tight deadlines have stopped me doing this but I've got no excuses now. The cost of framing adds so much to the cost of the piece, it would be nice to think that I could do it for myself. I'll let you know.