Yellow Tulips

Tulips are such elegant flowers, simple in shapes and in so many wonderful colours. And since Art Deco is very simplified, it was a perfect match for my personal challenge, tulips. Looking through images from my garden, I settled on the one I used in an earlier challenge, LOVE, and used it as a template for raw edge applique, with hand dyed cotton.
As a background, I used something that reminded me of radioes from the 1930s, freehand cut and pieced commersial fabrics, on top of pale green linen.
 

 The quilting in the background is simply straight lines, the tulips are free hand machinequilted, with French knots.

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.

TBCBEM

Memories, how do you chose one? I couldn't.
So I decided to try and represent them all using colour and then  explore the way memories are formed, reinforced and then lost through fragmentation. Research of scanning electron microscope photos and the explanation of the formation of memories  gave me the starting point for the quilting patterns.
The colours: walking through long grass, misty mornings, joy, pain, all can be captured through colour.
The strips and dots are memories, some overlapping, some being reinforced and some disintegrating. The quilting well that's the science and then the recall of events. Hanging from the bottom are the ends of the binding cord with a knot, so I won't forget.
And that weird title, that happened when my daughter, a psychologist, walked in and saw the quilt and said that's the bio cognitive basis or explanation of memory It's unwieldy but the perfect name and it stuck.
The quilt is made from cottons, some commercial some hand dyed, Super soft polyester wadding, cord, beads and 100 weight invasafil thread. The background is pieced and the surface fabrics stitched down with straight stitch close to the edge. this will allow the fabrics to fray over time much as memories do.

 

Margy

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.