I seem to be looking backward a lot these days when it comes to my art. I pulled this piece out of storage tonight and pressed it and rephotographed it. It is hard to believe that I was in the midst of panic over my thesis work this time a decade ago. This piece was not part of my thesis show but done prior to my first experiment with composting. It was however one of the key transitions from printing to fibers using imagery I'd been developing.
Town and Country c2001
Hand dyed and printed/painted silk, vintage silk, viscose rayon, silk organza
The design was repeated in etchings as well as collages (scroll down this page to see some examples) and comes from my fascination with township maps and plats. I have long been attracted to square things. This piece is also one of my first attempts at layering fabrics. This one is pretty complex in that regard and includes some vintage silk that had been in my mom's stash (the orange) but everything else was hand dyed or printed (fiber reactive dyes of course). But some of the fabric (solid color squares and the multi color rectangle lower down) was dyed back in summer 1976 in that very first fibers workshop I took with Judy Millis at SIUE. I was just talking about that red fabric in this post.
Where my mom acquired the orange silk I have no idea. I left the fabric exactly as I found it. It is only 20" wide with selvedge edges. In the lower right corner is a written mark as well as a tied resist and there is an open weave structure across the bottom. A layer behind the orange is purple, visible here from the side with a layer of organza over the top.
