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.