New Quilt: HWY70: Portales to Roswell

 

Our 4 Common Corners art group's call for Q3 of this year was called Fractures and Fissures.  I was inspired by the fractured look of this piece I made last year.  

The quilt was inspired by another photograph I took out my car window while driving down Hwy 70 on the way to my parents' home in Ruidoso, NM.  The trip is a long one, over 500 miles. I'm almost always leaving Oklahoma in the afternoon after working a long morning, so the day seems to drag on forever.  The first several hours of the trip are on I-40 through some very boring country and my heart is always itching to get back to the mountains.  The last section of plains, between Portales and Roswell, NM seems to take the longest.  However, I'm often driving that section during the early evening, when dusk is approaching and the skies are suffused with gorgeous light.

I started from another picture-out-the-window, and I specifically wanted one with more sky (compared to land) this time.

I processed the picture in photoshop and had it printed on shiny shiny polyester satin from spoonflower.  I forgot to take a picture of the fabric before working on it.  And of course it turned out bigger than the call for entry allowed so I had to trim off a few inches.  I cut it up into large pieces along the tile lines, and fused them to a background.  The background is a fairly coarse weave linen, which gives a great textural contrast to the shiny satin when you get up close.  

Here I am quilting along the tile lines on the landscape and in swirls in the border.

Here are some detail shots of the finished piece.

I wanted to make this piece for Fractures and Fissures because the plains often get a bad rap for being flat and boring from those of us who consider ourselves mountain folk.  But hidden beneath the surface are both literal and metaphorical fractures and fissures.  A walk through the plains turns up unexpected ravines, delightful pockets of wildlife and plant life, as well as human-inspired contentiousness. The often conflicting interests of those who want to continue extracting oil and natural gas, those who want to populate the landscape with alternative energy sources like windmills and solar panels, those invested in providing food for our society on farms and ranches, and those who have an interest in preserving the native plains ecosystem, filled with unique grasses and wildlife will rear their head to anyone willing to probe a little deeper.

Here's the final piece.  I love how much volume the sky and the top border capture;  that's really how it feels out there; sky forever.

Hwy 70, Portales to Roswell.  c. 2020, Shannon Conley, Photo Mike Cox