This past August I was invited to join the ‘Voyage’ International Textile Artists Group and immediately said yes. As with joining the 20 Perspectives, my aim was to boost my creativity, have something to work towards, giving me some kind of anchorage in this terrible year 2024, hoping, it would all turn out for the better.
At first, I had said I would most likely not be able to contribute to the group’s upcoming exhibition at BMO ’25, thinking it would prove to be too much stress to whip out a quilt in the short amount of time I would have once we finished our move. Especially as the topic ‘alchemy’ didn’t exactly cause a flood of ideas that asked to be put into a quilt.
When we started unpacking all our boxes in the new apartment, however, the first thing I put on the design wall was a conglomeration of fabrics with a special meaning, because I had come up with an idea after all. Searching the internet for a definition led me, of course, to Wikipedia, and the German page defines the term ‘alchemy’ as „die Lehre von den Eigenschaften der Stoffe und ihren Reaktionen“, i.e. the doctrine of the characteristics of elements/materials and their reactions with each other. (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alchemie)
The German noun “Stoffe”, however, also means ‘fabrics’, which gave me a short cut for my interpretation. Fabrics have a relationship and some kind of reaction when they are put next to each other, especially when sewn together, and when special fabrics are joined, the alchemy between them takes off. I decided to pair some of my special fabrics that were all waiting to be used: rust dyed fabric pieces I had brought home from my trip to South Africa, an indigo dyed scarf, the kimono from my collage project with Kathleen Loomis. I discovered that the pattern on the indigo dyed scarf, which I liked in its design but didn’t wear much because it felt too narrow, was off-set a bit when folded in half: the patterns don’t exactly match. Which I really like a lot.
The rust-dyed pieces came home with me from South Africa, and I love them for their coloring, intensity of pattern, and, of course, because they remind me of the trip to Krueger Park and the quilt festival at Johannesburg.
Alchemy, in
my understanding for this quilt, is not only restricted to the interaction of
chemical elements, but I am extending it to fabrics, when placed next to each
other. Putting it
all together felt good, and after a bit of turning and changing I liked to
layout, too.
First attempt - but it got turned around.
However, as I had noticed before in another context, but completely forgotten, the rusted fabrics from South Africa are so tightly woven that they are VERY difficult to sew, which was the reason why I had not used these particular fabrics up yet. Sewing them was hard for the machine, and quilting over them caused multiple thread breakages, disruptions in the quilting process and unpleasant loops on the backside. I was indeed getting to the point where I could have thrown this piece out of the window!
Deciding on a quilting design then proved another challenge. Yet when I started reading former chancellor Angela Merkel’s memoir that was published recently, and read the section on her most famous (or infamous) statement throughout the 16 years of her chancellorship, I thought it would be interesting to add another layer of alchemy. The quote is from 2016, when Germany was facing the massive influx of more than one million Syrians fleeing the civil war in their country, and quite a few other refugees from several other countries. Chancellor Merkel said that Germany had faced so many difficult situations and overcome them, and that we would be able to deal with and overcome this challenge as well.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kDQki0MMFh4
Interestingly enough, her full statement was hardly ever quoted, but reduced to the three-word-phrase ‘we will manage’. Events following this massive influx of refugees had and still have quite an alchemic-like effect on German society, which I myself felt vividly while I was trying to accompany refugees through the maze of German administration, rules and regulations, giving them guidance for everyday life in a country that is rather different from their own. For this quilt on alchemy I decided to put as much of the quote onto the quilt surface as would fit, and except for a few last words, most of it is on there.
Yes, I hated the quilting because of the difficulties with the densely woven fabric. No, I don’t think it is one of my strongest quilts. But it is giving a platform for some of my favorite fabrics, and it includes a statement for which I still admire our former chancellor. At this particular moment it is still not clear whether we have indeed managed to deal with the crisis, our current political situation is partly due to that refugee crisis (combined with problems going back to German reunification, and probably even further back). And in the end I don’t really hate this quilt. But it made a good title for this post (which I started some time in December and am only now finding time to finish).
