Upon Reflection, 50 x 29 inches, ©2003 Deidre Adams
Last week, I received two quilts back from a traveling exhibit. Elements from the Front Range Contemporary Quilters was a show of art quilts that was curated by FRCQ member Lorri Flint and handled through Exhibits USA / Mid-America Arts Alliance. The work traveled to various venues throughout the U.S. from 2005-2009.
Since I made this work over six years ago, it was really surprising to see it again. What I was doing then was so different from my current work. In 2003, I was doing a lot of hand-dyeing and discharge, and I was busy making lots and lots of fabric with these methods in order to have a big stash to choose from when designing. Upon Reflection features various fabrics made using the technique of arashi shibori, which I first learned from my friend Shelly DeChantal (sorry, no web site) way back when.
It’s not so much that I made a conscious decision to stop making hand-dyed fabrics, but once I developed my present painting technique, I just found it was a lot more suited to my temperament and the way my brain works. Dyeing can get somewhat technical, with deciding how much of any given color to make, whether to do gradations, figuring out how much dye to use, proportions of other chemicals used, etc. And no getting around it — dyeing is also just plain hard work, especially the hot-water rinsing part. The manual labor aspect of it was kind of hard on the old body. Painting was the answer for me. No advance planning needed, and much more spontaneous to do.
Silent Witness, 50 x 27 inches, ©2003 Deidre Adams
This is the other piece from the Elements show. It represents a kind of transitional piece for my working style, when I started doing more with paint, even experimenting with painting on commercial fabrics. I also started piecing with larger sections of fabric at this time, as I had become rather impatient with the tedious joining of lots of small pieces that I had done prior to this.
Well, it’s nice to have a bit of history for my archives. I’ve been busy the past couple of weeks on design projects. Hope to have some time to get back into the studio tomorrow.
Side note: Don’t you hate it when you have to eat your words? Less than 2 months ago, I just said I wasn’t going to be joining Facebook any time soon. Well, not too long after that, I got an offer I could not refuse and so, with some trepidation, I went ahead and created my Facebook presence. So far, the sky hasn’t fallen, and my e-mail box hasn’t become clogged with spam. It’s even sort of fun. I haven’t totally figured out all the ins and outs of it, though, as there’s a lot to it. Will Twitter be next? It’s hard to imagine that anyone wants to hear my random braindroppings on any kind of regular basis, but I suppose I now realize you should never say “never.”
Deidre it is so interesting to see anyone’s work from a few years ago & how their styles change. I have admired your painted pieces for a while & haven’t seen much of your earlier works so thanks for sharing these.
Re facebook I’m joined too after Alyson Stanfield’s keynote at the SAQA conference. Don’t think I’m making a good go of it yet- much prefer blogging.
cheers, Sue in Australia
Thank you, Sue. For some reason, I’m really enjoying the Facebook. It’s a good place to put all the really small bits that aren’t substantive enough to blog about. I could talk about my cat’s dental work, something I would never do in a blog post. And I’m enjoying building relationships. Who would have thought, after all my bluster against it!