13 June 2014

Dislocation quilt (almost) finished

The sleeve is yet to be added - I like to leave that till the very last minute! It has, though, been cut - from the sleeve of a shirt - and pinned in place.

It's a useful exercise to assemble some of the imagery that has fed into this quilt, in addition to my own photos of blurry feet and blurry roadsides ... perhaps it was the memory of these artful images that led to my blurry photos??

David Claerbout's "Nightscape Lightboxes" were shown in 2003 - I know of them via a book picked up a £1 at Marcus Campbell bookstore near Tate Modern.

The website for that 2003 show says: "The pictures - photographic transparencies in lightboxes - are of landscapes, shot in a moment that lies somewhere on the borderline between day and night, between civilisation and nature."  Yes, that borderline moment - that's a dislocation in the sense my quilt aims to convey.

Caroline Hall paints landscapes (and tube journeys), based on stills from videos captured on her phone -
Long Walk, Summer (oil on aluminium, 116 x 86cm)
"The final work is a series of moments layered up over time, unlike the tube journey paintings which represent one split second stretched out across the surface of the aluminium."

Helio Oiticica's "Metaesquema" works contain plenty of dislocation -
He considered them to be neither painting nor drawing - "something that lies in-between". The interplay between shapes and their background generates a sense of instability - another sort of dislocation, manifest in imminent movement.

One Metaesquema in particular, seen in the current RA Magazine, moved my thinking about the "dislocation" subject from overly complex to much more simple -
(via)
That image gave the idea for strips - "blurry painting" meant that the "dislocated" blocks, which interested me a first glance, would have been overkill - so the strips stretched unbroken from side to side. Using paint as the main "technique" was only possible because of growing familiarity with the medium through the daily painting project.

Now I'm considering whether the piece needs anything else - hand stitch? flicks of paint? (A better photo, certainly. And a title...)
That grey area, especially ... what does it want done to it? Less white? More green? Some yellow? Bits of black?

*
postscript - The quilt seemed to speak, and what it said was: "Orange ... circles..." - which I quickly provided, making loops of threads. They are like thought bubbles, and as I sewed them on, the quilt's title arrived - "Verge Blur". For the statement, I said something about "as the roadside passes in a blur, your thoughts are free to wander"... Of course the statement needed a list of materials and techniques and I was chuffed to be able to put puff-paste in the list ... it's hardly a classy item for using in an "art" quilt ...

Complete with orange circles, it's "Image 53" here, and will be shown in the CQ "Dislocation" gallery at Festival of Quilts, 7-10 August 2014.

2 comments:

Tank said...

red

Sandy said...

Actually, I like the grey part best...as is...and wonder if some of the rest needs a bit more white 'blur'?
But then you have the image in your head that you are aiming for.
Sandy