The week before Easter, known around the Christian world as Holy Week, is known in Uruguay as Semana Tourismo. Mike and I enjoyed several days’ visit from a very dear old friend, and the unknown new friend he was traveling with. The weather was perfect, we had a lot of fun catching up and getting to know the new companion, visiting some favourite places, consuming considerable quantities of Uruguayan wine and meat, and I was impressed that everyone managed to not overdo it on any occasion – and we also drank a lot of tea. Not surprisingly I didn’t do a stitch on my current work, and as I expected, after they left I turned back to it with fresh eyes.
This one is in a series of motifs sitting on distorted grids representing instability in the world around us, which I had tentatively named the Rules Based Disorder. While entering one of them into a call just before Easter, with two weeks of worldwide tarriff-induced chaos already behind us, adding to shipping chaos and talk of canals, security and so on, I suddenly hit on a better title “Out Of Order”. Perfect, and I wrote the following statement: For many decades, the concept of rules-based order underpinned personal, community, national and international networks. In today’s world, however, familial, social, trading and other networks are under pressures from social, political, financial, technological and climate change, and some of those systems are now failing, they’re out of order.
I hadn’t quite finished quilting the gold painted squares before our visitors arrived, and was very aware that I still felt a lack of committment to anything for the infill quilting that I knew I’d have to decide on and do to finish this work. The black background needed to be flattened down a bit. Machine quilting in black looked really wrong, out of place, and I had absolutely no appetite for hand quilting in black on black – around each square was enough of that, thankyou – and machine quilting in any colour would be wrong considering the hand quilted squares.
You might be wondering why I didn’t layer it all after printing the gold squares, and then do some quilting in cream/white stitching on those squares? Well that would have depressed the squares which was the opposite effect to what I wanted – they needed to stand out proud just a little from the black background, increasing the effect of their light paint colour – so to quilt inside them would have been conflicting.
These motifs above were stitched in the cream I’d stitched on the gold squares – but it was too bright and overwhelming. The square motif was right (uppper right), because it relates to the pattern on the squares, but the thread colour’s wrong. However, I had a fine pale gold thread, which looks just right – visible and toning with the gold squares, and fine enough to be definitely in the background. These auditions of thread and motif, plus evaluating time, all took several hours over the weekend, but now that I’ve found the right combination, I can just get on with it over the next couple of days, and I’ll easily have it ready for the photogtaphy date I’ve already booked.
