“Warm Void,” an Art Quilt

Unlikely Inspiration

There is a big maple tree right outside my studio window. Each year around Thanksgiving, the tree transforms into a red and yellow flame, which glows whenever the sun peeks out. It washes my entire studio in red light, and never fails to fill me with awe. One of my very first art quilts, Falling Leaves, was inspired by that tree, as was the Autumn Leaves wall hanging I created a few years later. Last year, my Experimental Wall Hanging was likewise inspired by the maple, even though it was purely abstract. There is just something very heart warming about autumn colors…

I wasn’t planning to make another fall-inspired piece a few months ago. I WAS, however, planning to tidy up my sewing room, which is somehow always messy. I started moving things about, and in the process stumbled upon some interesting materials. Uh oh!

The first interesting thing I found was a pile of thick cardboard squares. They were leftovers from a project my husband worked on a few years ago. He was about to put them in the recycling bin when I noticed and intercepted. They looked useful, even though I had no idea what for. So I saved them… 

The second interesting thing I came across were shoddy-made packing blankets that I rescued after a piece of furniture was delivered to our house years ago. Those, too, seemed too precious to toss away. 

Gray from afar but beautifully colorful up close, I could just see that they would be great for something, one day…

Finally, I stumbled upon an entire bolt of black tulle I bought a while back at FabMo. I haven’t found anything to do with it in all the years I owned it, but it really did seem like it had potential… (Can you see why my family thinks I’m a borderline hoarder? Or why my sewing room is permanently cluttered and will never get tidy?).

Those three great findings, plus a little pile of gorgeous, autumn-colored fabric swatches I got at FabMo on a recent visit, gave me an idea… 

Experimenting with Contradictions

When I made the Experimental Wall Hanging last year, I enjoyed creating many individual pieces that were all different yet at the same time very similar (yes, exactly like the leaves of my maple tree!). I also liked the buildup of layers of fabric, that created something between 2D and 3D, inviting the viewer to take a close, intimate look.

I decided to take that experiment further. This time, I chose to create rigid little squares that were each a finished art quilt, but which together would make a bigger whole. I cut up one of the shoddy blankets into squares, and stitched pieces of beautiful home decor swatches on top. 

I kept going until I had a fall-colored collection.

Once I had fifteen squares securely machine stitched, I pulled out my embroidery threads. Matching thread to fabric is one of my favorite parts of the creative process!

I chose to embroider a few rows of running stitch on each of the squares. The stitches came out imperfect, uneven, wobbly. They mark the journey my hand made across the fabric.

Once the hand stitching was done, I mounted the soft, fragile shoddy squares onto the sturdy cardboard. I used a simple glue gun to stick them on.

To finish them off, I glued black felt squares onto the back of the tiny quilts, and stitched them onto the shoddy along the edges.

The result was a pile of neat-looking, sturdy, contradiction-filled squares, that felt very pleasant to hold. Each square was a tactile, solid THING.

Despite lots of imperfections, the squares still had a nice, finished look to them. I arranged and rearranged them in different combinations, until I was happy with how they looked together. 

There was something very material about these squares. They were solid, rigid, opaque, and somewhat rough around the edges (quite literally!). I decided it would be interesting to combine them with their exact opposite: the soft, airy and transparent tulle. I painstakingly laid the squares face down, stretched a large piece of tulle over them, and carefully stitched each square on. It wasn’t easy, and the result wasn’t perfect. I did like the way the squares looked on the tulle, though, as if they were suspended in the air…

When I tried to hang the piece on a hanger I bought on my trip to Thailand a few years ago, however, I realized I had a problem. The soft, flimsy, slightly elastic tulle simply could not hold the weight of those sturdy, heavy-ish squares. The tulle collapsed as I tried to hang it on a wall, and wouldn’t keep flat against it as I was hoping it would. I wasn’t quite sure what to do, so I set this experiment aside.

A while later I visited FabMo again. While looking around the showroom, I stumbled upon a bolt of black synthetic netting, similar to the tulle but much thicker and sturdier. I bought a piece and brought it home, where I cut it to size and folded it in half, creating an even more stable substrate. 

I stitched my experiment onto this new background, tulle and all. The squares still appeared to be floating, albeit on a less airy and somewhat less transparent background. An artistic vision is important, but sometimes an artist has to listen to the materials, and make a few compromises as a result…

I decided to call this piece “Warm Void.” “Warm” is for the warm, comforting autumn colors. “Void” is for the transparency of the background, and the floating, meditative effect. I’ve been reading The Wheel of Time when I was working on this piece, and so the word “void” was very much on my mind. 

Warm Void is 14.5″ x 27.5.” This piece is harmonious, yet filled with contradictions: it is a 2D piece composed of 3D elements; it has solid, opaque components which are floating on a soft-ish, transparent background. It is made of cheap, lowly shoddy, but also of luxurious designer swatches of home decor textiles, and has rough vs. smooth textures. The squares have a hard core but a soft exterior. They are made of solid-colored swatches sewn onto multi colored backgrounds. The textured, tactile squares are suspended in a smooth, translucent net. The net itself offers support, but is also fragile. The rectangular and square shapes are straight and perfect, but the individual squares are not evenly spaced, the swatches are somewhat crooked, and the embroidered lines are a bit errant. There is an interplay of solidity and illusion, where the squares appear to float, their heaviness appearing weightless. There is also a contradiction between the modern, Western look of the art itself, and the traditional, Eastern feel of the Thai hanger. And yet, hanger and art somehow work together, complementing each other. This is a contemporary piece of textile art, which is also an art quilt. Like traditional quilts, it is composed of individual squares, except that it is quite distant from traditional quilts… With its many contradictions, I think, this piece feels very much like life and the reality we live in…