finished the quilt!

April 29th, 2009 at 07:20am SabrinaGsch

I spent the first part of the day laying out all my film squares in different patterns, taking pictures of the different options, and looking at all my photos. 

Here was the start of one pattern:

For a while I thought I would sew the piece together in alternating squares, but decided I didn’t like how symmetrical and boxy it looked. I wanted the piece to have more abstract movement.

I kept thinking about an artwork on view downstairs, El Anatsui’s Skylines, 2008

It’s a large wall hanging made of tops, screw caps, and neck wraps of bottles. It has a beautiful, decorative lightness and yet a kind of sculptural weight to it, which I love.

Conceptually our work has parallels- both make use of cultural detritus and evoke culturally-specific textiles (in my case, American “string quilts,” wherein long, thin fabric scraps left over from other projects are sewn and cut together; in his, the textile traditions of Africa, particularly the particularly the geometry and colors of Kente and Adinkra cloths). 

But visually I was drawn to the way his piece moves from a section of one color to another color, horizontally and with a kind of natural grace. Since I was after a similar kind of graceful visual movement, I decided to emulate that with my quilt, laying out out the squares so that the colors sort of washed from blue to red horizontally and vertically.

I thought I would have to hand sew the squares together, but that turned out to be unnecessary. I sewed one square to another, then another, and another, all by machine, and once I had a whole row, I sewed a finished row to another finished row. 

In the afternoon Josh, who works in the education department, took me down to the basement theater and into the projection booth, where we found a bit of 35 mm film left over from a projection test. I took it back upstairs and unrolled it to see the words “Look up in the sky?” and “coming summer 2006.” It turned out to be a preview for “Superman.” 

It works really well as the quilt’s border, and I especially love the light blue of Superman’s sky. (And again there’s a reference to Anatsui’s “Skylines.”) The light blue of the film is exactly the same color of the museum shelves on which I hung the finished piece at the very end of the day. Ultimately I envision displaying these finished quilts on light boxes built into gallery walls, but for now it seems to work to hang them inside the museum’s glass shelving system. 

The piece is very different when it interacts with light:

What do you think? 

Entry Filed under: in the studio