New Quilt: Twining, Art with Fabric Blog Hop

Every so often Alida from Tweety Loves Quilting hosts an Art With Fabric Blog Hop in which art quilters share a piece inspired by another artist.  She kindly invited me to participate again this year.  It's always lots of fun, I encourage you to hop over to that main page for links to others posting throughout this week. 

The other bloggers sharing posts today are Terry and Bea, and I definitely encourage you to check their work out:

Terry: http://www.terryaskeartquilts.com/

Bea: http://www.beaquilter.com/

This years theme was "1 + 1 = 3", and my inspiring artist was Maria Oriza-Perez a contemporary abstract ceramicist from Spain.  I've loved her work for a long time and her use of space, form, shape, and pattern really inspired my jump to dimensional fabric work in general.  A lot of her work feels very mathematical, but she really uses non-traditional geometric forms to give what feels to me like a lot of motion to her work.  In addition, I'm often inspired by the empty spaces and shapes created by her sculptures.  Really really cool.  

Anyone who's been following along here knows I've been working a lot with ways to introduce three-dimensional shapes and forms into my quilts, and several of the most recent (including this one) have been inspired by the concept of tesseracts.  Mathematically, a tesseract is a 4th dimensional version of a cube, but its a concept I was introduced to in A Wrinkle in Time.  There the idea is that a tesseract is a way of bringing two far away points in space and time extremely close together, to permit connections that would not be possible traveling through space and time normally.  

Of course I only have three dimensions to work in rather than four, but I love the idea of finding different ways to make shapes by bringing together different spots on the surface of flat quilts.  I've used a variety of techniques to do this, but recently have been using smocking.  

I start by painting a large solid piece of fabric and backing, then layering and quilting.  This one started out a solid gold-bronze color, and is a color scheme definitely outside my more common pink-purple-teal color palette.  I free motion quilt, in this piece with 30 weight thread to help give some more interest to the surface, and then finish the edges with a facing made from the same painted fabric as the top.

After the quilting/piece is finished, I start sculpting using a standard smocking technique.  This involves marking a grid on the back of the piece along with lines indicating points to be hand-stitched together.  Finally, I built a frame to support the back of the piece since the newly created fabric folds and shapes kept wanting to flop all over the place!

Here's the final quilt, I named it Twining because the shapes and colors make me think of children's book illustrations of Jack and the Beanstalk.  

Twining, c. 2018, Shannon Conley, 53" x 27" x 4" Photo: Mike Cox

Twining, c. 2018, Shannon Conley, detail Photo: Mike Cox

Twining, c. 2018, Shannon Conley, detail Photo: Mike Cox

I hope you enjoyed seeing my piece, and please visit the other blog hop participants!  I hope you'll come back here again, and if you're interested in more dimensional work, you can check out some of my other recent pieces.