When I was in South Africa I got hold of a piece of mudcloth that I fell in love with completely. It was clear that I had to do something with it and text, a favorite recurrent in many of my quilts during the past few years. I began stitching on the cloth, combined with a slightly faded piece of red linen, and made up a bit of text that describes the cloth in a kind of definition, ending on a note that is not typical for a definition. But then the piece lingered, pandemic circumstances impeded with the intended exhibtion, and it didn't get finished. So when our year-long topic "Conversing with the Earth" appeared, it was instantly clear to me that this quilt had been waiting to be included in this collection. Can you get into a deeper conversation with earth than by dyeing fabric with fermented mud, even if I had not been the person who did the dyeing? In addition, I acquired a few more pieces of mudcloth, though not the entirely same design, so I have enough mudcloth to carry me through three pieces of the topic we are working on.
I brought out the piece I had already worked on, and found that our size regulations required that it be added onto.
I constructed fabric segments that could be used to take up some of the motifs in the cloth.
Then I added hand stitches to combine the different pieces that needed to come together.
In the end I realized I needed to add more zing to the quilting of the text because it could use a bit more contrast to be more easily legible. I did this by going around the letters in white to enlarge the contrast.
This piece is still in process, due to Life 1.0 and its current challenges. Below is the state at moment of 'reveal':
Please check back after July 10, hopefully a finished version will have been published by then.
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