Forest Fire

The best (or the worst?) thing about art quilt challenges is the exploration of theme, coming up with ideas, developing them, searching for images and drawing sketches – only to return to the very first idea.

In this particular case I was desperately searching for an idea that is not dust or ash, skulls or bones, breakage or leakage, etc. but something positive, perhaps even beautiful. However hard I tried, I simply could not find anything like that, which I could successfully turn into a quilt.

So the first idea / image I had in mind was the bare remains of the Tatra Mountains after a devastating fire in 2005. Such a scale of destruction had never been experienced before, but several times since then.

I began with a few 25-30 cm wide strips of fabric that I had dyed some years ago in complementary colours of red and green, carefully trying to avoid ’mud’ in the middle. Now I inserted very narrow green strips into them, some straight, some gently curving.

As for the assembly of the ready strips, I loosely relied on this image of forest fire.

For the quilting I used a fire-like pattern in the green areas, and stitched bare tree tops in the red sections. Once quilted, I took black acrylic paint in a tube, and coloured most branches.

Upon second/third thought, my quilt does not directly make a reference to ’What remains’, but rather to the question of’ What remains?’

The quilt measures 60 x 80 cm.