2017

We move forward from two successful exhibitions in 2016 in Prague and in the USA to the challenge of an exhibition in the Netherlands in the Autumn. We continue to work on A2 sized pieces in portrait format and will be producing four pieces over the year with the theme of 'Freedom'. An essential part of our art is working in series to a common format which does give us all a framework for our creative endeavours.

Friday 28 March 2014

Shoreline

My most recent aerial view is of the beach. For the sand I used a piece of rust dyed fabric, for the sea several blues. The breaking waves are made from thin strips of scrim stitched down with seed beads. Some time ago I had bought a set of buttons in the shape of shells and starfish. I cut off the shank and glued them down with E6000.


Monday 24 March 2014

 
 
 
'Spirit of the Earth'
 
For this years theme of 'Earth' I have chosen to use ancient rock art. This was after seeing photographs taken in Kimberly, Australia by my nephew. This quilt was influenced by a Wandjina painting of a rain and cloud spirit who created or influenced the landscape and it's inhabitants. It is said to be 3,800 years old!
 
 




Monday 17 March 2014

Old Amsterdam

Old Amsterdam is inspired by a 1593 map of Amsterdam. The title has two meanings as Old Amsterdam is also a cheese with a rich flavor. The cutting out of the many canals was a fiddly task, I used an interfacing as this would not fray. Ink was added to give it some color and lots of stitching to represent the buildings. The blue and green fabrics are my own hand dyed ones.


 Detail of the city centre:


Tuesday 11 March 2014

Earth Marks - Beaker people

This year I want to work on marks made by early man on the earth, from the incised simple marks on early pottery and caves to the marks made by early peoples and pilgrims as they carved out trails and routes over the planet.

My first piece is based on the pots made by the Beaker people who lived in and around Europe and North Africa around the time of the Bronze age. I used a reference pot from the Lincoln Museum as a starting point for the shape and copied the incised decoration from around the pot surface. I wanted the images of the decoration to appear to 'float' over the surface of the pots, rather than have a more figurative form of decoration on each pot.

As usual, I started with white calico that I dyed and then used Inktense blocks to shape and colour the pots. (I really enjoy working with these blocks, the colour pigment is so good and they fix well to cotton.)
I used transparent fabric paint to colour the incised blocks after stitching around each shape. There is not a huge amount of stitching on the pieces, only the outlines of the pots and the decorative incised shapes, but wanted to have a more 'painterly'effect on this piece.

Jean







Saturday 1 March 2014

Volcano

Our planet is very diverse. It has mountains, valleys, caves and other elements that cause it to be so special. I chose to focus on some of these special forms and give them my interpretation.

My first quilt is the Volcano. Through fabrics I depict the eruption smoke, the lava spills destroying everything in its way and shades are characterized by a volcanic environment.
 
 
Shoshi