Dislocated

With the 1 July deadline not so far away, and my experiments towards my first ideas for the CQ "Dislocation" challenge unsatisfactory, another approach to the subject has been developing. It started with the "blurred photos" taken at the V&A and elsewhere

and also out of the window of moving trains and cars, like these -

All dealing with the idea of travel of some sort, moving from one place to another ... and being in a frame of mind that persists throughout this relocation. Or does it? If it does, is "there" then the same as "here" was?

Leaving that rather unfruitful line of thinking aside, I looked hard at some of the blurred images on my camera and gathered some information from them, as well as a feeling for the duration of the blue and the size of blurred areas.

 And stretched the photos to augment the blur -

stretched then squished then cropped

stretched to fit into a larger canvas

subtle stuff happening in a detail

It would have been "easy" to print these onto fabric, apart from the small matter of size - 50cm wide (or long) won't fit my printer. So Plan B it was -- painting with acrylics onto fabric.

Finding fabric - cottons, linen, silk;  adding lines of machine stitch (travel lines?) to some -

Before painting began, these were layered up, so that another kind of "dislocation" would happen - the thinner, wetter paint marks would soak through the top layer into the next one. Then I painted with blues, yellows, greens, white, even a bit of black, for a few hours, and arranged the strips in various permutations, eventually deciding on this sequence -

(It will be rotated 90 degrees to be hung.)

Here's one I did earlier - the sample -

On an offcut, notes on which thread was used for quilting, in the (false?) hope of being thoughtful in choosing which thread where -

After the 8" square sample - here's the real thing under the needle -

I'm almost halfway down, and at the point of being overwhelmed by thread choices - too many possibilities!

(The painter's tape helps keep the stitching lines level, and the clips make it easy to unroll and reroll, for fitting under the machine.)

After the quilting, it might need some additional painting (adding some flash to the blur) - and then there's the trimming, the edging, the labelling, the photographing, the sending off ... and the waiting to hear whether it's been accepted ...