PIECES OF THE PAST

2000
40" x 72"

Pieces of the Past

textile paints and fiber reactive dyes, hand painted and hand printed fabric scraps, glass beads, tulle construction: machine quilting; stamp, block, screen, and monotype printing, collage

It was time to work with all the wonderful and meaningful scraps of my painted fabrics that had accumulated over several years. PIECES OF THE PAST, a triptych, is the result of this process. I have a container of little scraps, and I thought I'd simply use up the ones in this bin and then start all over again. Wrong! I still have lots and lots of scraps left over in the same bin and I'm working on yet another large piece. I think the scraps must regenerate as one uses them up!

It was such fun to reminisce about prior pieces I had created with larger portions of these same fabrics. Some scraps were from paintings made as long ago as 1989! I was surprised and delighted at how meaningful each little piece was to me. It is so intriguing to create literal connections from one work to the next. My quilts are like a family that way. There are common threads: scraps, images, concepts appearing in each new piece. I want that sense of continuity in my work to be as real as it is intuitive.

Everything is linked by time.

This piece, like so many of mine, is created in a method I call collage construction. It involves layering and arranging pieces of cut fabrics and threads on a foundation piece of muslin. The composition is then covered with a large piece of tulle and machine stitched in a grid pattern. This stitching serves two purposes: it does hold all those little pieces together and it creates additional visual layerings of color and pattern in the composition. The next step is to add batting and backing and to quilt and possibly bead the work. It's a simple, yet, involved process.

EXHIBITION HISTORY: 2000, PAPER, STONE, SCISSORS PART III: SCISSORS WORK, Torpedo Factory Art Center, Arlington, VA