Last night was the reception for "On the Fringe" - a juried show of works by Connecticut members of Surface Design Association, at the Bruce S. Kershner Gallery in Fairfield, CT. My piece, Twelve Patch with Crosses, was in the show and, before the night was over, I was thrilled to see it had acquired a red dot.
The thing about this piece is that it became something so incredibly different from how it started. I am accustomed to going with the flow when I sew ... the textiles and the muse conspire to guide me the way they want to go and I'm very glad that they do.
The horizontal piece, up above, started out to be a vertical 12-patch and it was going to be very minimalistic ... solid black background with stitching only on the squares.
But, as I was stitching, I kept feeling like I wanted to fill that black space, but I didn't know how. I kind of wanted to fill the space with stitches, but I found I was not comfortable stitching "outside the box." The more I looked at it, the more the black took on its own life and all I could see were the crosses. Suddenly, I wanted to make crosses. After all, all the cool kids (i.e. awesome stitchers) have crosses.
ARTISTS REPRESENTED ABOVE, CLOCKWISE STARTING FROM TOP LEFT (click on a name to see the artist's website) ::: CHRISTINE MAUERSBERGER, JUDITH MARTIN, ELEANOR McCAIN, JUDE HILL, AND JUNKO OKI.
So, I plotted and I stitched ...
And this is where all those scraps of fabric and stitches landed ...
