Love’s Illusions

Most of us grew up with a fairy tale, Hollywood movie image of love. One day our Prince Charming would sweep us off our feet and whisk us away to a wonderful castle where we would live, rich and happy forever. There would never be any problems or discord, just longing gazes into each other’s eyes and eternal bliss.

For most of us who have been in relationships in the real world, we know that Life sends us many challenges whether health or finances or family or personal issues that test our love.

These challenges can affect a relationship and make it stronger or eventually wear it down. For those who survive the tests the result is a true love based on having seen each other at our best and our worse and having decided that we love and respect and accept each other no matter what. This is True Love!

In this quilt I have woven a double ikat in shades of red to represent love in its many forms and in shades of blue-green to represent the various challenges. The resulting fabric is the fabric of Life.

The white fabric is covered in black text that represents the good and bad aspects of a relationship. The red text consists of the fairy tale words. When we look at love through rose-coloured glasses we selectively choose the fairy tale words and ignore the rest.

Balancing Act

I have always been interested in the functions of the left and right sides of the brain. The left side deals with logic, analysis, sequencing and time. It is the area for speech, mathematics, science and language. It deals with the details of every aspect of life and prefers structure and orderliness.

The right side of the brain deals with emotion and the big picture. It is the area for creativity, intuition, colour, shape and pattern. It has no sense of time or true language but rather uses a visual form of communication. Its connections are more random and spontaneous rather than sequencial. It is not bound by rules or regulations but is more free-wheeling in its processes.

While working on this quilt I tried to use both halves of my brain. The left side was the leader in planning the content of the quilt. It did the research, collected images and information, looked at colour palettes and set up a time line. The right brain was then asked to present a whole, complete image based on this information. Then it was back to the left brain to develop a work sequence, techniques and approaches. The right brain stepped in whenever there was an overall design decision to be made.

Being a very left brain dominant person, it was an interesting experience trying to work in this intuitive way.

In the quilt, the left brain is represented by the background while the right brain is represented by the areas of strong colour. The concept was to have both areas work together to create a sense of balance.

Hand printed and dyed fabric, surface design, appliqué, machine quilted, hand stitched

If Not Here, Then Where?

The theme of escape can bring many different things to mind, some pleasurable, some fanciful and some more dire. I think that it would be a rare individual who never wished for an escape from one thing or another.

In my quilt I wanted to ask the question “ Escape to where?” Simply put, if I were having a perfect day, where would I be? What would I be doing? Who would I be with?

The answers to these questions would probably vary depending on the situation that I wanted to escape. If it were the cold of winter, I might want to be on a tropical island. If it were from the tedium of everyday life, I might want some place exciting or stimulating. If it were from the noise and chaos of a big city, I might want to be in a tranquil and serene place. The possibilities, like the reasons, are infinite and personal.

In this quilt I have created a map of an imaginary place to represent all of the imaginary places that I might wish to be. My presence is represented by an abstract copper coloured symbol which symbolizes a compass for direction but with a central square which represents me. I am, therefore, the heart of this desire and the chooser of the destination.

The outlined compasses represent some of the possibilities of where I might want to be.

Silence

In a world of hustle and bustle, silence seems like a reduction in man- made noise: no car engines or buses or motorbikes, no horns or music blaring, no screaming children or adults, no loud talking on cell phones. When these are all reduced we say that it is quiet when actually there are probably still a lot of sounds around: insects buzzing, birds singing, wind blowing, rain splattering, waves crashing. We often find these sounds soothing and relaxing.

Whether in the midst of man-made or natural sounds, the sounds most difficult to block out are those within our own minds. For many of us there is a running commentary continuously playing in our head and this is the most difficult place to find silence. And yet there is no true silence without the ability to interrupt the monologue in our mind.

In this quilt I have attempted to convey the idea of inner silence. The bohdi leaf represents the spirit which is floating noiselessly on the surface of a pond, perhaps a meditation image to focus on when seeking inner silence.

 

Resonance

My approach to an art piece is usually a psychological or philosophical one. I am trying to convey a thought or concept in a visual way. For this theme of leaving our mark, after much thought I felt that the belief that I wanted to express was that by our very existence we leave a mark. Just as dropping a pebble into a pond causes concentric ripples to flow outward in all directions, our presence also creates ripples of  influence in the world around us.

If we now think of dropping many pebbles into a pond the ripples spread out and begin to overlap thus causing the patterns to merge and change. Similarly although we send out our particular pattern of energy, so do others and these patterns encounter one another and form new patterns. So we may effect change in other people in ways that we will never know but they will also effect changes in us. Thus we build our families, our communities, our societies and our world.

For Buddhists the bohdi leaf is a symbol of the spirit, as Buddha was sitting under a bohdi tree when he reached enlightenment. I have used an abstracted image of a bohdi leaf to represent the spirit and the echo quilting to convey the idea of the energy waves that we emit and receive as we journey through our life.

I have used a technique of layering colours of silk and then slashing down to reveal the under layers to convey the idea that our influence exists on many levels, physical, emotional, intellectual and psychological.

The materials are Indian silk and commercial cotton fabric.