There are two things it seemed my mom never had enough of: fabric and time. Although she sure had plenty of fabric when she ran out of time! I inherited about 100,000 yards of fabric in 2013. Well over half has been donated to charities my mother would have approved of, and a generous helping gifted to her guildmates, leaving me with around 25,000 yards left to try and use up before I die! But I love a challenge!
One of the things I aim to use some, if not all of the fabric for, is an installation of fibre-based new media. As an animator, I want to constantly make things move, wiggle, vibrate. So why not tell some of my mothers stories, through quilted portraits of her, animations about the quilting processes she taught me, sharing my memories of her memories, all enrobed in fabric in some way. For the final installation, I envision a maze like structure made from both quilted work and raw fabrics with projections a-plenty bringing everything to life. it’s pretty cool in my head, but also an enormous undertaking.
Even three + years in, this project is still in it’s infancy. Owing to the length of time this is going to take, I figured I’d post a smattering of my tests here. Some are digital, some analog, all are animated (except for one).. just click on ’em and watch ’em go… and have a lovely day!
a machine stitched rotoscope of a sparrow in flight, digitally enhanced
a digital rotoscope of the perl stitch using the continental knitting technique
a single fabric collage portrait of my mother as a teenager, captured three times to make a boil
a digital collage made with scans of fabric + flat flowers i drew, digitally printed onto multiple fabric panels, outline machine quilted, photographed and sequenced into animated boil.
photograph of my mother as a girl, digitally enhanced with fibre textures and colour, subtly animated.
a digital animation using fabric textures and added colour, from a photo of my mom as a girl, holding her accordion.
another digitally enhanced photo of a ship that transported post WW2 refugees from Europe (including my mom), using fabric textures and added colour, slightly animated.
a fun little mom-morph
a loop from about ten or so nearly identical patchwork blocks, using fabrics inherited from my mom.
fabric cuckoo clock on a digital background
a paper test of a tweety bird for my cuckoo clock
a fabric pheasant puppet i made to test my mobile homemade animation station
a non-animated sampling of some of the repeat patterns i’ve been designing for fabric printing for this project
floral fabric I had printed from a repeat I created using digitally manipulated prints from my hand-cut stamps… analog to digital to analog to digital!
polka dotty-ish fabric I had printed from a repeat I created using digitally manipulated prints from my hand-cut stamps… analog to digital to analog to digital!
diamondy fabric I had printed from a repeat I created using digitally manipulated prints from my hand-cut stamps… analog to digital to analog to digital!
clouded fabric I had printed from a repeat I created using digitally manipulated prints from my hand-cut stamps… analog to digital to analog to digital!
my third test, simple fabric collage from a photo of my mom in her youth.
my second test, made in the last month of my mother’s life, building on the first test format with an underlying collage.
my very first test, made in the last month of my mother’s life. It’s a boil (three frames), of three machine stitched tracings of my mother as a young girl.