That Dragonfly!

You may have seen it at Festival of Quilts.  It was also featured on The Quilt Show in the US as one of a small selection of art quilts.  And it won the Art Quilt prize and Sylvia Critcher's Judges Choice at the Harrogate show.  It was originally supposed to go to Uttoxeter in April but took longer than I expected (a lot longer in fact - one of my quilting friends kept sending me emails headed "The Curse of the Dragonfly")  It's actually work towards - hopefully - an exhibition by the recently-formed Etcetera group, on the theme of transition and is the first of a series of pieces on this theme.

It's gestation - as is usual with me - took a long time, partly because the format (landscape rather than portrait) was a requirement for the first group piece and it took time to get to grips with it).  After chucking around all sorts of ways of exploring it finally came up with the somewhat obvious idea of huge dragonfly (the quilt is 64" x 48" and it bleeds off the edge with reverse applique wings based fairly closely on real dragonfly wings.  Obvious but I thought it would work visually.  Ok - let's be honest -  I thought it might look spectacular and people might not walk straight past it as happened with the rather quieter Sea Edges at the NEC last year.  One doesn't like to see all that effort go unnoticed.

Though the project started as an investigation of the natural history of the dragonfly (having been fascinated ever since an Emperor Dragonfly accompanied me on a walk through Wytham Woods many years ago) the whole thing quickly acquire a symbolic significance.  Dragonflies can spend up to five years going through all the various stages it takes to grow and spread their wings.  As someone who, for various reasons I won't go into here, was unable fully to spread her creative wings until later in life, this had a particular significance for me.  Added to that dragonflies in some cultures are a symbol of self-realisation and suddenly the whole thing became powerfully meaningful...

For those of you who like to know these things, the background is simply patchwork with stitch-drawn pictures of the various stages in dragonfly development.  The dragonfly itself is cut-back applique in silk/metallic, silk and nylon crystal organzas, all hand-dyed.  The whole thing machine-appliqued and quilted.  It was the cutting back that took the time.  And I am still finding bit of "confetti" around the house even now

Sea Edges

I don't normally take this long over a quilt.  This one took just over a year.  It began with a workshop with Jo Budd on monoprinting and collage and a sketchbook full of drawings paintings and photographs of various bits of the Northumberland coast in the north-east of England, up against the Scottish border, an area of warm welcomes, windy deserted beaches, abbeys and castles, seabird colonies, farms boats and inshore fishing, saints and wildlife: my favourite part of the country.

My monoprints were of the organic rather than formally-patterned kind, sort of messy but deliberately so.  Organising them into a collages (including layering with organzas and chiffons) was a lengthy process, from here:

 



to here:

 

 

 

over a period of about three weeks.  Simply pinning on a design wall, moving elements around until they appeared to balance.  I discovered that the striped bits (originally greyscale samples) were essential to give the piece a bit of structure.  The fabrics chosen were ones which suggested the colours and weathering of the coastal landscape.

 

 

The rest was about the quilting.  Though I'd originally planned it as a machine-quilted piece I found that certain areas needed hand-quilting, and it was this that took the time - a mediatative process that meant the quilt evolved slowly (my hand won't let me hand-stitch for too long at a time) and developed in unexpected ways.

 

 

 

The end result (above) combines areas of texture with areas where stitching has been used as a medium for drawing - close-ups below:



 

 

 

 

 

 

 

From the Salon des Refuses

The Contemporary Quilt Group, of which I am a member, has an exhibition at Festival of Quilts this year and I was one of the sixty-plus members who entered a quilt.  Unfortunately I was one of the ones whose work didn't get chosen.  I did discover however that I am in excellent company: people who have produced much better pieces than I did also didn't get their work chosen.  I suspect the standard of the exhibition will be extremely high.

The theme of the exhibition was Tin and the starting-point was a photograph by Tony Howell of East Pool Tin Mine, a restored tin mine in Cornwall.  A comment by an historian friend about Cornish miners who had migrated to the north of England being known as "Cousin Jacks" led me into spending some time doing historical research of my own, and being deeply moved by the way in which the closure of the mines in Cornwall in the nineteenth century led to mass migration and emigration from the county - a quarter of a million men, mainly miners, emigrated between 1841 and 1901; whole villages could disappear from the census in a ten-year period; there was a twenty percent reduction in the male population in each ten-year period between those years.  At the beginning of the twentieth century the total population - male and female, including children - was less than half a million.  "Cousin Jacks" took their skills to the far corners of the world - including North and South America, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. There's a saying: "A mine is a hole in the ground, anywhere in the world, with at least one Cornishman at the bottom of it", and to this day people all over the world celebrate their Cornish ancestry.

I suppose one of the reasons for my response is that I come, a couple of generations back, from a mining family myself.  Not Cornwall, but South Wales, and there and in parts of Yorkshire I have seen the effects of pit closures on local communities - not as devastating or dramatic as in nineteenth century Cornwall, but still a sense of the lifeblood draining out of the community when the mines close.

This became the basis of the quilt above.  Unfortunately, though there is a thematic link to the original photograph, the visual links to it have mostly disappeared - it seemed appropriate to use a ruined mine rather than a restored mine as the main image and the only bit of the photograph I've actually been able to use is the texture of the stone.  So yes  I would acknowledge that it may not have fulfilled the criterion of having a specific (i.e. visual) reference to the original image.  The jurors also felt that there were some pieces where an interest in the history had taken over rather than the consideration of the visual impact of the piece, and I accept this criticism too.

My personal feelings about this piece is that there are things in it that I like but also things that are unresolved.  I think I distracted myself with two things: firstly the attempt to convey a message visually, which is a very difficult thing to do and which I don't think worked out effectively (I have a tendency to believe that a piece of work should be able to communicate independently of artists statements or footnotes) and secondly the decision to include a "picture", however simplified.

It has not been wasted: I learnt a great deal from doing it.  And I do like the lettering (dyed fabric hand-painted with discharge paste), the story of the "Cousin Jacks" half hidden behind the image, and covered with layers of silk organza.

Only problem is - what do I do with it now?  It is a somewhat bleak image, not one that fits easily on the walls of my home!

Collages Part Two

More collages from last autumn - this time from an A5 sketchbook: the first two use ink drawings of beetles from the Leeds City Museums collection. Top - cut-out beetle on paper rubbed with soft pastel, plus paper coated with oil pastel, then indian ink, scratched and rubbed back; bottom one uses paper printed with iridescent paint, bought textured paper and paper monoprinted with lacy pattern from an almost exhausted marbling tray.

Above - wet-on-wet watercolour paper, wet-on-dry paper, plus monoprinted paper.

Two more using marbled papers.  Above - three different cut marbled papers, plus coloured pencil lines.  Below: oil-marbled paper with added pale water-colour and wet watercolour pencil lines plus translucent blue tracing-paper overlay.

Two using photoshopped photograph prints plus cut watercoloured paper and (in the bottom one) torn sugar-paper.

Top: monoprinted and marbled papers.  Bottom: scrunch-dyed tissue paper, bits of linoprint sampler, and watercolour "bullseye".

Many thanks for the comments on the earlier ones, and - yes - they are feeding into my quilting.  Plus being fun, and a good way of exploring composition.  All done very quickly as a sort of creative "starter" for the day.

Collages

 During the autumn last year I played with simple one-a-day collages, allowing approximately ten minutes for each.  They used papers and prints I already had made at various times, and much of the focus was an exploration of composition:

 monoprinted and blockprinted white and coloured papers;

 wet-on-wet watercolour on hand-made paper; wet-on-dry on cartridge paper

oil-marbled and freely cut watercoloured cartridge paper (above and below)

inked pages from an old falling-apart guide, marbled paper, watercoloured paper, blue tracing-paper;

cut monoprint;

and cuts from the same monoprint with layered coloured tissue-paper.

I also filled two other sketchbooks, in different shapes (of which more later)  Lots of fun - and I learnt a lot too!

Big Buttons and Catching up

The Contemporary Quilt Group Journal Quilts for the October-January pieces are all required to use buttons, causing many people including myself something of a real challenge.  Looking through my button box I came across eight huge buttons and the idea of using these as focal points for composition proved irresistible.  As I have eight buttons I have challenged myself to double up and make two pieces per month.  I've also set myself the task of exploring complementary colours in each one.

The first, called Yellow Colour Field with Big Button is a collage of various fabrics - cotton, scrim, dyed wadding, felt and butter muslin anchored with machine quilting and embellished with couched purple thread and bits of silk carrier-rod - lots of  time playing with the arrangement but the stitching was straightforward.

The second arose from a series of samples I made for a workshop I taught on Improvised Curved Strip Piecing for Textile Without Limits.  It uses fabrics which originated I from Ghana along with some hand-dyed fabric.  This is also a tryout piece for something larger.  It's called Ghanaian Grid with Big Red Button.

Number three, which also uses fabric from Magie, dyed damasks and Zimbabwean prints, is called Big Button Blues.

The fourth one uses my stash of fabrics designed by Native Australian Artists.  My husband was born in Australia and was fascinated by Aboriginal Art.  Improvised curved piecing again but this time in crazy form.  Couldn't resist calling this one Big Button Dreaming!

International Quilt Challenge

Partly inspired by seeing the work of the Twelve by Twelve group at Festival of Quilts, I have recently joined an internet challenge group, The International Quilt Challenge.  Sixteen of us, including quilt artists from the UK, Ireland, Australia and the US are producing a piece every two months to a theme set by each member in turn.  The first theme, chosen by Annabel, was Sunshine and Shadow.  For a long time  I couldn't decide what to do then, pondering one morning with the deadline imminent, I became fascinated by the shadows of my neighbour's ornamental plum tree on my bedroom curtains, which reminded me of yet another photograph taken by my late husband, of evening shadows on the mesh curtains in the downstairs bay window: 

What I found particularly intriguing was the way that the shadows of the leaves in some cases were crisp and in others half-formed and varied in depth/intensity.

The resulting quiltlet was composed intuitively and at speed with no sketchbook input.  The ideal base fabric presented itself to me - a piece of silk charmeuse I'd dyed some time earlier, and the shadows were made from layers of silk and polyester organza I'd also dyed.  I ironed the organzas onto black mistyfuse, then cut and bonded freely composing as I went.  Then finished the composition with free-machine quilting. Though the end result is in my view a bit limited, and has nowhere near the depth of some of the other pieces in the challenge, I do sort of like it...



More challenge pieces

First updates on work from NWCQ Weekend group - aka Textiles Without Limits:  Mary's piece with the couching finished:

Phyl's leaves (well worth enlarging to see the detail, especially the embroidery:

and a clearer photograph of Leah's piece!

and a whole series of small pieces by Julie - showing a wealth of techniques and a wonderful degree of imagination, not to mention artistic ability!

Leeds West Indian Carnival - 44th Year 2011

Just a few of many photographs!