Art Quilt: Melt Away

Once again, a book became the catalyst for a project. Speaking on the radio about her new book [Amazon affiliate link], Immemorial, Lauren Markham talked about her anxiety about the world, her search for a word that would mean both holding onto and missing something before it disappears, and how Greenland's glaciers, which she used to marvel at from an airplane window, are starting to melt away. Somehow, the phrase, "melt away" stuck with me, and I felt compelled to honor her vision, buy the book to read, and create an all-white quilt.

After having a conversation with the artist-founder-creators of the Bureau for Linguistical Reality (an interesting project in itself), and scouring the Oxford English Dictionary with a magnifying glass, "Immemorial" became the word for Markham. The prefix "im" can stand for in, on, or not. It holds the both the idea of a place or memory and the loss of it.

Melt Away

30.5"w x 37"h (52"h includes streamers) (77.5 cm x 94 cm/132 cm)

Cotton; silk organza; ribbon; stenciled with fabric paint; reverse appliqué; silver-lined crystal seed beads; iridescent clear sequins; machine pieced and hand and machine quilted

Some of the stenciled areas are from an original stencil I had initially designed for my fire quilt; two of the areas are from stencils I designed based on two of my favorite sashiko patterns, that also seemed appropriate to the them: rising steam and fish scale.

Iridescent sequins and silver-lined crystal beads add icy sparkle. Streamers are meant to evoke a cascade of water. A melting away.

My takeaway from the book is that we must do two things at the same time: work to slow the warming of the earth as best we can, and develop better ways to live with the earth's climate as it changes. We must plan to do better.