Reflections on Mud Quilts

This body of work that I have begun is little more than a sort of scratching or mark making in the dirt not unlike that work we did as children. This native clay accepts my thoughts and intentions, my rhythm, my pattern making, my timidity and holds their form as a memory for a while. These are not stable works as they are susceptible to traffic, construction, and the elements just to name a few vulnerabilities.

I was able to revisit Impression 003 three days after it was made to document changes in the piece. The clay at the site had a drastic change in color becoming lighter as it dried. The shapes made by the compression of my stamp retained more moisture and were darker in appearance giving the piece a heightened contrast. My lettering which was hardly discernable at all when I created it could be clearly read.

You can see in the cracked and drying clay around the quilt that my work brought stability to the earth at this construction site. The piece survived for many days; even after several rains it was still partially visible.

Since this impression I have been working on a bisque stamp with which I hope to make larger and more quilt-like impressions. The prototype is in the kiln as I write. Below you can see a couple of photographs of the stamp in progress:

Thinking About Layers

I think that I have finished Goin’ Visitin’ (you can read the accompanying description on the projects page). I’m really trying to push my Ps skills in these pieces. I’m also trying to fully explore this idea of a geobiography. How can you represent it visually?

I pulled into this portrait many references that anyone who knew Virgie well as well as faint references to the Stecoah Township in the 1980s. Stecoah has always had such a strong community identity. I’ve been thinking about why that might have been and how I might express those in words. But it has something to do with layers. Stories and memories layered overtop of landmarks, trails and fields. Walking the same worn path from the back porch to the garden or down to the spring that had been used for years. Life was lived in layers.

Virgie was one of the brighter personalities and was known far and wide - you can see it in her expression, right?

You might also be able to tell if you look closely that I landed on included the book of Ruth as the text layer in this piece. I chose this portion because Virgie left home at the age of fifteen to marry a much older man. There were just echoes there that I wanted to capture.

Compositionally there were some challenges in the way the images were divided. The quilt square creates such a distinct line. Initially I brought in the grid of the screen porch scaled up to fill in that space and then a layer of the polka dotted shirt large over top of that. The blend layers created some interesting coloring choices in her shirt that I liked and decided to keep but they were isolated in the center of the canvas. I attempted to bring in those colors in the grid section to tie the two sections of the piece together and move the eye around a bit. I think it works - I’ll know better when I return to look at it again in a few days.

Be Frank

Today I visited Frank Liske Park after most of this weekends rains had subsided. I wanted to experiment with pressing designs into the ground. I took my quilt inspired watercolor palette from this summer’s Topics In Ceramics class and also some rubber letter stamps. I also played around with stamping with found rocks and sweetgum balls.

The sweetgum balls were too soft from the rain and gave way before making too much of an impression. The rocks did okay and with persistence perhaps you could find a rock with clearly defined edges that might work quite well. One thing that I noticed with the rocks is that it created a resistance/suction with the earth and sometimes a clump would stick to the rock and come away ruining the pattern. The rubber stamps did okay on some surfaces but are really too shallow to make much of an indention in the coarser grands of the surfaces I could find.

I thought that sandy breaks along the creek bank might work well but they turned out to be a bit to coarse and granular to capture good details. In the end I good a good impression in a muddy road exiting a picnic area – this is the Impression that I chose to document:

I experimented documenting an Impression with my GoPro and also documented other things from the site– some videos of the storm water flowing over the rocks and waterfalls, some beautiful fungi and a bright chartreuse lichen. You can take a look at everything on Google Drive.