Following on from Hazel's post last week, here's the story of my quilt, Black across the Sun II, which will also be travelling with SAQA's Wide Horizons VI exhibition later this year. One of the things that is good about this exhibition is that the call for entry allows older pieces to be entered - up to three years old in fact. Which meant that this quilt of mine which was originally made for a Grosvenor exhibition of my work in three of their southern quilt shows gets to be seen by a wider audience.
Black across the Sun II
This quilt is an attempt to depict the strange feeling you experience during an eclipse - right at the point of totality, and the route by which I came up with the design is quite convoluted!
To go right back to the beginning, a while ago Contemporary Quilt, one of the specialist groups of the Quilters' Guild, had an exhibition where the theme was Dislocation. They specified dimensions of 50x120cm, but I also wanted to try out a square format. Although this is the second quilt in the series, and not the one I made for the CQ exhibition, they have a shared story.
To go right back to the beginning, a while ago Contemporary Quilt, one of the specialist groups of the Quilters' Guild, had an exhibition where the theme was Dislocation. They specified dimensions of 50x120cm, but I also wanted to try out a square format. Although this is the second quilt in the series, and not the one I made for the CQ exhibition, they have a shared story.
Black across the Sun
It took me a long while to think of something to do for this theme. I knew couldn’t involve the obvious interpretations using bones and X-rays or displaced peoples and refugees as I have no experience of these. Having been a nurse in a former life I was thinking about the odd feeling people experience when coming round from an anaesthetic (I have no direct experience of this either!). While I was working I was listening to a prog rock song called Anesthetize by the band Porcupine Tree (don’t ask!). I usually listen to music while I work, but I have to know the lyrics well, otherwise I spend my time trying to work out the words and no work happens! On this day the words crept into my consciousness and I realised they could be describing an eclipse.
I remembered my experience of the eclipse in the UK in 1999, seen at its full extent only in parts of SW Cornwall and South Devon. In the middle of the day the sun was obscured; there was an eerie quiet darkness, with no birds singing or flying and a strange otherworldly landscape - not quite dark, but definitely not normal. This was a sense of Dislocation that I could relate to. I researched the phenomena which accompany an eclipse and learned a lot in the process, and this enabled me to develop ideas and imagery for the quilts.
Circles and scribbled rings have long been one of my go-to symbols when I'm at a loss for what to draw: they're very versatile and can represent pebbles, shells, fossils, or the cycle of life and many other concepts, so my sketchbook already contained marks and ideas that I could use for this piece. Luckily in my stash were several black fabrics, mostly hand-dyed in various combinations of black and brown, which were great for printing with discharge paste to remove the colour.
I created the main fabrics for the pieces using monoprinting techniques for the large fractured rings, freehand drawing with a needle-nosed bottle for the smaller rings and zig-zags and Thermofax screens of some of my sketchbook pages of texture and rings for the positive and negative prints on the supporting fabric. I added in a breakdown printed fabric and a 'plain' dyed blue for a pop of colour in the thin shards which fracture the surface at intervals.
I created the main fabrics for the pieces using monoprinting techniques for the large fractured rings, freehand drawing with a needle-nosed bottle for the smaller rings and zig-zags and Thermofax screens of some of my sketchbook pages of texture and rings for the positive and negative prints on the supporting fabric. I added in a breakdown printed fabric and a 'plain' dyed blue for a pop of colour in the thin shards which fracture the surface at intervals.
The textured fabric was printed using a Thermofax screen of one of my sketchbook pages containing a text exercise that I love. Start by writing words or a phrase repeatedly to cover the page in one direction (then turn the page through 90 degrees and write it all again; repeat this twice more and the words will no longer be legible, but will read as texture. This is a great way of adding layers of meaning to a piece.
I constructed the quilt with simple strip piecing, free-cut so that the strips tapered to nothing. The machine quilting developed from a phenomenon called shadow bands - thin shafts of scattered light from the edge of the eclipse, and I used a variegated black and white thread - normally too high contrast for me, but perfect for this quilt. The centres of the large circles are hand quilted with black crosses or FMQ'd with a spiky vermicelli, and some hand stitched orange circles in the text areas echo the circle on the sketchbook page which remarkably come out on the Thermofax screen (usually only black and white is reproducible).
I constructed the quilt with simple strip piecing, free-cut so that the strips tapered to nothing. The machine quilting developed from a phenomenon called shadow bands - thin shafts of scattered light from the edge of the eclipse, and I used a variegated black and white thread - normally too high contrast for me, but perfect for this quilt. The centres of the large circles are hand quilted with black crosses or FMQ'd with a spiky vermicelli, and some hand stitched orange circles in the text areas echo the circle on the sketchbook page which remarkably come out on the Thermofax screen (usually only black and white is reproducible).
 | The water so warm that day I was counting out the waves and I followed their short life as they broke on the shoreline I could see you, but I couldn't hear you You were holding your hat in the breeze turning away from me In this moment you were stolen There's black across the sun Anesthetize part 3 © Steven Wilson 2006 |
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