Quilt 15 - 2023 'Rough Cut'

 

Having worked on several pictorial pixelated images, there was a part of me which wanted to revisit the geometrical and chromatically logical style from which I had moved away in 2019 with “Quilted Quilters” (Quilt 10). At the same time, I wanted to incorporate some of the developments I had made during that time, most notably the “false weaving” technique, and so “Rough Cut” was born.

 

I also wanted to follow on from the triaxial aspects of “Fireworks” (Quilt 9) as I had in my mind the idea of triangles, each with a slightly different optical illusion, being joined together to form hexagons. I found that the three different directions of the weaving could be achieved through “false weaving” though there were a couple of complications. Firstly, the neat rectangles which used to form squares now needed to become parallelograms to form diamonds. Secondly, some of these parallelograms needed to be left leaning and some of them right leaning !

 

For the fabric itself I returned to my beloved Pointillist Palette 2 and spent several happy months cutting up photocopies of it and arranging them such that the eye would think that the cube in the centre of each triangular section was leaping out at it in a different way. As I did not want to end up with a hexagonally shaped quilt I added the corners. Here again there were many paper versions before the definitive one was chosen.

 

The black areas are actually also made of the same size little parallelograms as the rest, though this is even harder to see than it might be because the eye spots the larger quilted diamonds. Each one of these comprises four different pieces of fabric!

 

Though the quilt was accepted for the competition in Houston it came back without an award. The view of the judges, with which I have some reluctant sympathy, is that the pointillist nature of the fabric detracts from the colour gradations which they would have liked to have been more accentuated.

 

Click thumbnails on the right to enlarge