my ten thousand piece quilt

This is a simple post about the simple quilt that I am hand piecing this week. 

ten thousand piece quilt by Yoshiko Jinzenji, naturally dyed cotton, 72 inches quare

Inspired by Yoshiko Jinzenji's ten thousand piece quilt that she made in the 80's and included in her book, Quilt Artistry: Inspired Quilts from the East.  

I started it during the drive to Kitchener to deliver the Inside Out exhibition .  

Simple because you begin at the center, and then go round and round, increasing the number of patches in each strip as you work towards the edges.

My one patch quilts are usually made from collections of nine patch blocks that I join up.  

This one is different.  Simpler in a way.  

We continued on after Kitchener to a resort in Mexico.   

The fabrics are left over linen scraps from previous projects that I am using up.

Hand piecing squares fills me with positive energy.

As the work in my lap grows under my fingers, I feel stronger and braver.

 

The pink strip I'm adding today is 16 squares long.  It's left over from the sunshine quilt.    

This soft textile is a journal of days.  

It is recording memories of this week in Mexico with our daughter and her boyfriend.  

 Sending out love from us.  xo

quilts as women's art: a quilt poetics

The body of the quilt is the work of coming to like in yourself what was only adored or ignored by your mother, or other objects of your love or your lovers;

The body of the quilt is the work of coming to like the work of another woman, and the passing through of all rejection and neglect by another woman or man;

The body of the quilt is the work of coming to like yourself as a little old lady and an old little girl and a new little sister;

The body of the quilt is the work of going over all your mistakes and lost dreams liking yourself all the way all over inside and out and all around the whole border not knowing where to start and not knowing where to stop;

The body of the quilt is the work repeating all your moves and liking the fact that you did it all, did all the moving;

The body of the quilt is the endless search, your endless search, but as your companion as you go through the motions of work, as you work your way: by focusing, waiting, turning, twisting, aligning, matching, fitting, pulling in the faraway, visiting with the absent, drawing out the ineffable, amplifying the vestigial, leaving well-enough alone, enduring the unendurable, practicing readiness for the other, learning the lesson late and liking yourself for forgetting it again, and you’re finally looking up and seeing the body of your quilt behind your cat, behind your potted plants, up to your neck, coming out of your ears, and before the body of your quilt you see the people you want to see the body of your quilt and they like it, more than anyone every liked your body, and said so, and you know now it does not matter whether you did because you’ve come to like yourself even more than the body of the quilt, and you can look at it and like it by yourself.

Radka Donnell

The Quilt's Body by Radka Donnell is on page 113 of Quilts As Women's Art:  A Quilt Poetics.  

I read this book at age 40.  It gave me the foundation of my career as an artist/quiltmaker.  I copied many things into my journal at the time, including this entire poem.  

New Beginning, the other side.  I speak about making it in the lecture my pandemic summer.

"Quilts are to mainstream art what poetry is to prose".  Radka Donnell

simplicity unafraid

Q:   What was your route to becoming an artist?

A:  I will answer this question, but it will take several posts.

I've been working steadily away for a long and rich time.   

The posts will include photos of my most current work as well as links. 

The links go back to earlier posts from this journal.

These are the inspirations that helped me find my voice as an artist. 

Amish Quilts

Women who originally designed our traditional North American quilt patterns  inspired by the awesomeness of nature

Women who designed the traditional patterns inspired by the connection to the bed.  (This link goes to more autobiographical info so be warned. 

I have been maintaining this blog for 14 years.  So much has happened in the world in that short time.  Take good care my friends. xo  

Gee's Bend Quilts

Strips by Annie May Young, 1975   corduroy, 95 x 105 inches

 Annie May Young

Medallion by Annie May Young 1976  work clothes  108 x 77 

This group of astonishing quilts may be the most important influence on improvisational contemporary quiltmaking ever.

Strips by Annie May Young 1975  corduroy, 101 x 66 inches

At this time in history where there is revolutionary hope for black American's, I want to pay respect to the makers of these inspiring works of art.
I've been very influenced by these strong women artists.
I continue to be influenced and I'm not the only one.
It's time to thank them.
This post and the ones I am making on instagram are because I want to amplify their voices.

Four Block by Loretta Pettway 1960 used men's clothing 78 x 73 inches

 Loretta Pettway

Brick Layer by Loretta Pettway 1970  denim 84 x 66 inches

There is so much flair in the bold geometrics.
I  love that these quilts are made from men's and women's work clothes
house dresses, cotton sacks, and scraps of corduroy left over from the Freedom Quilting Bee.

String Quilt by Loretta Pettway 1960  used men's clothing 94 x 76 inches

There are so many questions now in this most strange and frightening time.
The pandemic has not stopped.  The world is broken.
The systemic illness of global racism is finally being addressed.

How can the world be truly fixed?  Is it possible?
This is a time for all of us to think boldly.
This is an oportunity to re-imagine.
Where do we begin?

Medallion by Lorraine Pettway 1974  work clothes 1974 

Lorraine Pettway

I've given links to the makers in this post, but they all go to the same website.  Souls Grown Deep
This last link takes you to a description of the purpose of the foundation, which in a few words is to support and advocate for the African American artists from the southern parts of the USA.   This organization is the caregiver of the Gee's Bend Quilts and welcomes donations.  I've donated and I encourage you to as well.  Here is a direct link to donate.  It's something.  I thank the many who are protesting and being so brave.  I have some hope.

I'm also putting a link here to the Strategist  that provides ways to dontate to support black lives, the victims, and the activists.
 
"The choice of not paying attention has led to death in others."  Rev Lucas Johnson

 It's hard, but people are ready for this now.  The world has to change."

rosie lee tomkins

 sometimes, I don't want to understand,

the slip : family cottage

I just want to gaze at something delightful that excites my eyes.

 

Doing this rests my heart for some reason.  Makes me feel as if I'm on a holiday.

Ned and I have started on our road trip to Halifax for my exhibtion with Penny.

The two quilts in this post are by Rosie Lee Tompkins, here are more. Rest your heart.

I Begin With Silence

When I first started to make quilts, all my efforts were accompanied by questions: to speak or not to spaek? to be silent or to talk back? to explain or let it pass? to interrupt or let it be?

In earlier times, in Bulgaria, women kept a little stone inside their mouths to keep them from talking back or screaming.  It was a woman's Stone of Wisdom.

Silence is my best friend and my shadow, I work from silence and I speak out of silence.

To interface with silence is stilll the most sustaining, assuring, and calming reality of quilt work.
I begin with silence to articulate the acts which quilt making covers and the actions it contains.
My experience has taught me that silence, the production of cloth, and the work of touch are basic forces.

Using silence as the over arching metaphor of my discussion of quilts, I intend to dynamize our view of the emotional surround, the emotional energy and the practical efforts that go into quiltmaking.

If taken seirously as women's art, quilts cannot be perceived and enjoyed as isolated aesthetic objects divorced from the relationships of women to each other and to the rest of human kind.

I work out of silence, because silence makes up for my lack of working space.

Working on a quilt I am wrapped in silence, wrappped in thought.

Anyone contemplating quilts and quiltmaking also has to enter this space of being wrapped so as to emerge transformed.

All text by Radka Donnell 1990, an art quilt pioneer
All images of a new work in progress, the middle and back are rescued blankets, the top pieced from plant dyed flannel, quilted with red thread grid. 

Quilt National 17 (the Nancy Crow legacy)

....and the Skeptic by Karen Schulz   81 " x 76"
cotton fabric, cotton batting, thread, yarn
hand dyed, machine pieced, machine quilted, couched

 

"I found myself asking the question, "What are you afraid of?"  The answer came back, "Look at what people have done.  You can do anything."  I decided then and there to embrace the whole of myself, the poet and the skeptic."  Karen Schulz Maryland USA  (Juror's award)

Nightshift by Kit Vincent 79 x 79 "
cotton, silk, dyed and commercial cottons, thread, batting
machine pieced and quilted, appliqued

 

 "I began without expectation, allowing the design to surface as I worked.  My goal was to challenge the perception of the material and to create an emotional repsonse with the viewer."  Kit Vincent  Ontario Canada

Chasms 23 by beth Carney  54 x 67 inches
hand dyed cotton fabtic, silk batting, madeira threads
raw edged fusing, machine pieced and quilted

 

" The bright colours traveling through the sometimes black, sometimes murky-grey, become a symbol of who we are as we move through experiences in life that continually challenge us.  Beth Carney  New York  USA

Zebra by Bonnie Bucknam  51 x 51 inches

hand dyed cotton fabric

machine pieced and quilted

 

"While touring South Africa, I had the pleasure of seeing a zebra in the wild." Bonnie Bucknam Washington USA

Conversations on Meaning  by Gerri Spilka  82 x 100 inches
commercial and hand dyed cottons, cotton and wool batting, cotton thread
improvisationally machine pieced and quilted (denoted by the artist
machine quilted by Marina Baudoin

 

"Interactions series reflects a fascination with themes that reappear.  The interactions, relationships, and ambiguities inherent among people, place, and human-made and biolgical forces."  Gerri Spilka  Pennsylvania USA  Juror's award

Formations #26 by Petra Fallaux  83 x 85 inches
hand dyed pima cottons, procion mx dyes
freely cut fabric, machine pieced and quilted

 

"Having grown up in the Netherlands, I find that I am most attracted to spare geometric forms.  Formation 26 evokes the vast horizon and moody morning skies over coastal Holland"  Petra Fallaux Pennsylvania USA

 Petra Fallaux was one of the jurors for this 20th biennial of Quilt National and says this about the exhibition as a whole:

"The driving motor behind the first Quilt National at the Dairy Barn in 1979 was to provide an exhibit opportunity to artists whose work was unwelcome by the organizers of the existing quilt shows.  This original impetus has resulted in a rich, tangible, and continuous biennial history of throught-provoking Quilt nationals.  Today, Quilt National is an art exhibition among many others of its kind, but it will forever be the first of its kind."  Petra Fallaux

Nancy Crow, one of Quilt National Founders has ben making quilts for 40 years
standing in front of the quilt that was awarded best of show 

"Wow!  What a rich variety of works greet viewers of quilt National 17.  As a juror, I was thrilled to see so many strong quilts entered by artists whose work I did not know and additionally thrilled by the astounding new growth shown by seasoned artists known for their singular earlier styles.  In all categories, I found that the best works exhibited dramatically strong ideas combined with dedicated techniques that were skillfully executed."  Nancy Crow   Ohio  USA

Line Study 17 by Margaret Black    90 x 75 inches
Kona cotton, thread, wool bat, cotton batting
free form cutting and piecing, machine quilted
Best of Show award