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Ildiko Polyak

Coldness: Amundsen

As a couple of years ago my interest in quilts moved towards more representational, choosing the topic of my three quilts in the Conversing with the Earth series did not take as much time as usual.

I wish to present explorers from the recent past whose life and work have made us know the Earth better. Heroes that relentlessly dedicated all their lives to finding out the most possible about one specific geographical area or one element or one type of terrain. These people were also kind of idols in my childhood that my parents read about --- in the absence of internet and social media.

The first piece puts Roald Amundsen into the limelight, though not exclusively as I will explain below. Coming from the cold Norway, Amundsen trained himself to be an explorer of even harsher climates from an early childhood. He started sailing at the age of 25, was the first to navigate through the Northwest Passage in 1903 to 1906, and was the first to reach the South Pole in 1911. Later he made several expeditions to the North Pole, which was his dream destination, however none of these were fully successful.

After doing some intensive research about the South Pole, many of Amundsen's predecessors and Amundsen himself, I envisaged a blue-white sheet of ice with Amundsen’s figure towering above. Though the fact that it is indeed Amundsen was becoming less and less important. The quilt is based on a map drawn by Amundsen and the only photo of his taken on the pole.



I first dye-painted a single piece of fabric, using brushes, a brayer and a plastic card, to produce a kind of icy surface. After estimating the ’correct’ height of the figure, I created a 'threshold' version of the photo. After ironing Vliesofix to a piece of fabric in deeper shades of blue, it took almost a full day to cut all those teeny-weeny bits.


Once the figure was in place, I found out where to put the pole, and added some terrain details with an oil stick. Then came the addition of a few important place names using a stencil and black fabric marker. This was followed by drafting the latitudes and longitudes with a hard pencil, otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to quilt them accurately. After making the sandwich, I stitched all lines with white thread so that they are just subtly visible, and then stitched around all the bits of the figure. I put long red embroidery stitches to mark the approximate route of Amundsen from leaving his ship the Fram to the Pole.


And then came a bit of a turning point that I referred to above. I found out that the father of our dear group member Jorge Edgar Leal was the first Argentinian to reach the South Pole in 1965. I really wanted to hide this somewhere in the quilt. So I decided to pick some important figures in the history of the South Pole, and stitched their names around the three sides of the quilt. They are there, they are part of the ’ice’, they are people whose lives have forged into one with the South Pole.


The quilt measures 24" x 32" (61 x 81 cm).



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