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Tuesday 1 May 2018

The Series 'Play of Lines' and how it came about

Hilary has asked my to write something about the quilt featured in the SAQA Journal. In fact, I haven't seen the journal itself yet, somebody only sent me a scan. I hope I will eventually receive a copy... but of course I did give input to the article.
The quilt shown is this one:

Play of Lines IV

It is one of the early pieces in my series 'Play of Lines' (you can see more pieces from the series here), which, as the article states, was inspired by my son's early drawings. It continued up to no. 40, although not all of these quilts were made from his drawings. 
In the series I was working on exploring the relationship between lines and their contexts, changing the original inspiration, working on color combinations, different arrangements - basically doing the 'working in a series' exercises that one does when one is trying to develop an own voice. One quilt would frequently lead to another idea, and I worked on that series for several years.
I used only hand-dyed fabrics, mostly my own, only very few from other dyers, and that was when I also started my business with hand-dyed fabrics. (Which I recently discontinued.)  
This particular quilt was the first attempt at using a particular drawing by my son, and I was still struggling to find my bearings, but I was determined to use yellow, which is my favorite color. Because I ran into quite a few problems along the way while making this piece, I then started developing a technique of individually crafted paper templates that made it easier to achieve proper joinings of seams because I did not really like the effect I arrived at with this one. However, come to think of it, perhaps I should try again. Make this one over, in different colors, certainly it would turn out differently... As I often said to the students who were taking the class that was based on this technique: you never know when a series is finished, there might still be a piece waiting down the line that belongs into this particular sequence!
 

2 comments:

  1. This is a very challenging series which you have done Uta . Each piece so different from the next .When I have done a series it has only incorporated very few quilts and I admire the fact that you have created such a large number of pieces in just one series . Amazing.
    Rosemary

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  2. Thank you for sharing with us. It is very interesting reading about others thoughts & processes that go into cteating their work. I particularly like your last line ... when is a series finished?

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