Anticipation

Do you know that moment when you hold your breath, wondering what will come next?  Or when you ask yourself, Can I .... ?  Or, when you hope .....

That pause, filled with possibilities and bursting with energy, is what I wanted to convey with my piece; the anticipation that's experienced in the silence before something comes into being or happens.

The yellow color palette is a nod to the phrase, Silence is golden.  I wanted to create a feeling of multiple possibilities, hence all the different shapes bubbling to the surface.  I used all manner of materials including commercial cottons, hand painted fabrics, and paper towels that were tinted with watercolors.

Rocky Crossing

I found the sound of silence during a busy walk a few weeks ago.   Friends invited me to the World Heritage listed Barrington Ranges to discover their favourite getaway,  Rocky Crossing.   It offered me the perfect image to present for our current theme, Sounds of Silence.

From my vast collection of photo's taken that day, I selected this one to profile my piece.    It was printed at home on prepared fabric for printing.

I wanted to bring you, the viewer, a sense of encountering the sound of silence.   So I framed it with my self-dyed cotton & silk fabrics, organza, and some needle-punched fabrics to bring in soft texture of a forest.   The printed image was enhanced by hand sketching with ink pens, just a little.  Leaves were machine stitched by using water soluble fabric and wool/silks, then raw edge applique stitched to the background.  Colours selected aimed to reflect the richness of the forest atmosphere.

Time was of the essence due to my other priorities - this piece was completed from start to finish within 2 days - the fastest piece I have made yet!   I hope it brings you a sense of peace and reflections of your  own forest-walk experiences.

Silence in a heartbeat

Since audio is a great part of my profession, I really like this theme. At first glimpse it looked so easy, but as I started to work it became quite a challenge. To analyze "the sound of silence" as a professional, both sound and silence are not visual, we don't see them, we hear them. So how to visualize? If you go into a "dead room", where no sound exist at all, you start to hear your own heartbeat, and the rush of blood in your veins. I didn't want to make a dead room as a background, and using word -  what language to choose? But music-notation is the same all over the world, so I chose the sign for the musician to take a general rest, (in french they call it silence), and put it as a background. I chose grey on a white background, because I wanted something neutral. On this I appliqued the sound-wave of the heartbeat in read in raw edge applique, to represent the blood. The echo-quilting represent this "sound" as it bounces around in the body, fading from red towards pink and grey.