A whole new phase of my art....2016

In May, 2016, my son and daughter-in-law told me that I was going to become a grandmother: I was absolutely delighted, and I immediately began to make a baby quilt. Of course, this could not have my usual embedded object technique, but maybe a patchwork? No, it should have the alphabet, and lots of fun details. So I came up with something different: I assembled images online, turned them into line drawings, printed those lines on paper and ran them through my thermofax machine. Using thickened dye, I printed the lines on cloth, then  used more thickened dye to paint in the images. When it was all painted, I washed it and embroidered and quilted it. Say what?? Take a look:

So, for the letter P, for example,  I gathered images of pencils, pandas, peacocks, pelicans, penguins, polka dots and piano keys, then assembled them into a single letter block. (my son has an interest in letter fonts, so I made each letter in an appropriate font  (Palantino Linotype for P, Quadraat Sans for Q, etc)

Here's the letter block for P, and how it looks painted and sewn. I fit 4 letter blocks on each 8.5 x 11 paper and thermofax sheet:

I had to be very careful, since I was printing them all on one piece of cloth, and wanted more border around each box.  

This next one is the only photo I took while the painting was in progress. Are you having trouble figuring out what letter spells firetruck and traffic light?  This is the other side of the quilt, with Japanese hiragana, since my grandchild will be raised bilingually.  (Hiragana is one of several Japanese language systems, along with  katakana, kanji, and romaji. It's a complicated language).

Since this required very small quantities of different colors, I mixed my dyes in pill boxes:

I mix my sodium alginate the night before, pour a bit in each pill section, then add the dye powder and stir. Since the cloth has been soda ashed, the dyes last a few days. 

At first, the color samples were just quick swipes on a paper towel. Then I got smart and made the cloth version  (see previous pic) Old plastic containers for water and clear sodium alginate, and container lids and measuring cups as tiny palettes to mix my colors.

Some years back, my husband had large sinks installed in the basement for a dye studio:

I spent many delightful days in my basement studio, listening to NPR or classical music, drinking my tea and slowly painting in all the images. Once all the images were dyed and washed, I embroidered them:

After embroidering both sides, I quilted the 2 sides together. I enjoyed this whole process so much, that it led me to a whole new series of art, which you'll start seeing in the next post.

But wait! Where's the finished baby quilt? Well, my granddaughter has it, and someday, if she has a blog, maybe she'll share it. But it's not mine to share.

Sicily 2016 (40"h x 51"w) ...the country and the quilt.

As a totally lapsed, atheist Catholic, I was amazed by the omnipresent religiosity of Sicily: shrines built into city walls, innumerable churches and statues.  From the ancient carved temples to the well-maintained cemetery mausoleums, this is a country dedicated to the hereafter.  Perhaps this impression was heightened because my sister and I visited during Easter week, when slow processions of nuns and priests marched through the narrow streets, carrying life-size statues of the crucified Christ. 

But in Sicily, the dead are not merely buried. In ancient times, graves were carved into the stone.

In the past few hundred years, some bodies have been mummified, like in the Capuchin Catacombs of Palermo. In more recent times, the dead have been given their own cities...

We had seen a few of these odd edifices as we drove along, and one rainy day we stopped to explore: what IS that? We finally found an entrance..

..into a whole walled city of the dead. There were streets of architectural marvels and other neighborhoods for the less wealthy. Miniature versions of the cathedrals and monuments we'd seen.  

Back home, I assembled some fabrics into a composition, which I photographed. By photoshopping images over it, I was able to create a working plan. Then I started to transform the places I had seen into cloth:

I printed images of the mausoleums and a confessional, decorated with copies of the enameled portraits found on many of the crypts. 

The small shrines found on so many walls became holy medals (and a hamsa - hey, Sicily has been invaded by everyone) sewn under netting. The 'wall' here is formed from old, dyed, kitchen calendar towels, and the openings are constructed like bound buttonholes.  

Digging into my collection of rosaries and religious paraphernalia, I found objects to glue onto wool, then sewed them under cloth. Above the larger crucifix here, I sewed a label from a scapular ("whoever dies wearing this shall not suffer the fires of eternal damnation") and added in some beautiful embossed leather from an old wallet. The skeleton? I once found a string of Halloween lights shaped like skeletons, and cut them apart. The pieces have turned up in a lot of my art. 

The wonderful cathedral in Siracusa (which is actually built over the structure of an ancient temple) was distorted into a tall, skinny line drawing of a tower. That image was printed on oaktag, fused to wool, and the lines and openings cut out with an Exacto knife. I glued on a few beads, and embedded it all under cloth. I happen to think it's really cool that a temple embedded under a cathedral is now, in my art, embedded under cloth.

Two more details: these cherub faces are small doll heads, cut in half and drilled with tiny holes by the eyes, mouth and nose so I can tightly sew the cloth over them. The small skulls on the right are part of a 100 skull necklace  that I bought long ago in New Orleans.

I wrapped it all up in an old shirt as a border (and a hug):

The finished piece, guarded by the Virgin Mary and some of the many goddess figures found in a museum there.