June 17th

 

Going for a bike ride in the afternoon I saw this solitary rape flower in the field...

On June 17, 1953, an uprising took place in the Eastern part of then-separated Germany, people went on strike and protested against the regime, unfulfillable raising of quotas of production, political conditions. At least 50 people died when Russian troops intervened. (Find historical notes in English here. Find historical notes in German here.)

Subsequently, June 17^th was declared a National Holiday in the West, called “Day of German Unity”. It was scratched from the list of holidays when German reunification took place in 1990, and October 3^rd became the new National Holiday.

In a way, the events of June 17, 1953, influenced my family’s history.  Shortly afterwards a brief period of family reunifications began and my grandmother and her two younger daughters (one of them would become my mother) could legally leave the GDR to join my grandfather, who had left the country by swimming through a small river after he had been told that Russian authority were planning to arrest him. Without that uprising, who knows what would have happened?

As the day came and went this year I read several newspaper commentaries on the fact that Germany currently does not have a Memorial Day for victims of GDR-rule, and only this year a first (temporary) memorial was created in Berlin. The history of Germany as a divided country is still very present in my mind due to the fact that my mother’s eldest sister stayed behind because she was already married when her mother and sisters left, and her husband thought he could not leave the small business he had taken over from his parents – only to be disappropriated a few years later. I always thought it would have been rather appropriate to keep June 17^th as a national holiday. Or choose November 8 or 9 as a day of national remembrance, because so many historical events took place on that day, it would have made much more sense than taking October 3^rd.

After the last couple of rather emotional weeks and a lot of work I have gone to be with my husband for a few days and could use the not-anymore-holiday as a quiet day. Yesterday and the day before I had finally sat down to work on my newest piece for the next 20 Perspectives challenge. The topic is “3D”, which is not my piece of cake at all, but I just had to go along with the group’s decision. Which resulted in me putting it off for much longer than was wise, except for a little bit of planning a few weeks ago.

 

Using denim – which I never expected to be doing in quilts – I am working on an appropriated version of Henri Matisse’s “Blue Nude”. Attaching the denim bits on the background fabric was relatively quick and easy.

 

Now I wonder why I had the idea to use seed stitch for the entire background…

 

 Listening to an audio book, sitting on the balcony and enjoying the sunshine time passed pleasantly enough, and I already got a lot of the stitching done.

Fortunately, reveal date was pushed back by 2 weeks, so I will be relatively close to finishing, I hope, by the time that date rolls around.

Being part of history...

Last April I posted about how I finished a quilt for the German-Korean joint exhibition about the experience of living in a divided country. (Read here.) The exhibition has been shown in several different places by now, has been invited to Ste. Marie-aux-Mines next September, and is waiting for a verdict on whether it will be shown in Houston. When I was making my quilt, I was struggling with my family's and my personal involvement in history by having lived through some of the times I represented in the quilt. My aunt, who lived all her yound and working life under dictatorship, first the Nazis, then 'Socialism', and only a few years in 'freedom', after she was retired. My memories, how my mother always was preparing some package for relatives and friends, marking it as 'presents, no commercial value', taking care not to include printed matter, records or cassette tapes, or jeans. How on November 9, 1989 suddenly a room mate of my then fiancée ran through the apartment and shouted 'They are opening the wall!' and nobody dared believe it, after weeks of rising fear and insecurity with regard to how the East German government would react towards the rising numbers of protesters in the Monday marches, demanding change.
So there was a lot of broohaw about 30-years-end-of-the-Wall this past November. Speeches, self-praisal, groups of youn people from abroad being shipped to Berlin to participate in some events to commemorate the happenings then.
Ever since it happened I have been unhappy with how the even in 1989 has overtaken that specific date. Yes, it certainly was an important date, I would never contradict that. But there were other important things that happened on or around November 9 in German history in the 20th century - it seems unfair that the fall of the Wall is the one which receives most attention nowadays.
End of World War I. The 1938 progroms against Jews (link in German, link in English). The first attempted attack on Hitler in 1939 by Georg Elser (link in German, link in English), which had an 80th anniversary and was mentioned much less. These, of course, I have not lived through. But somehow they always affected me, because we were living in the aftermaths of what Nazi-history had done to my country. My son, now a sound 14 years old, had not been born in 1989 and has a very distant relationship to that part of history, as he told me recently. He has read The Diary of Anne Frank, but different from my own experience many years ago, it was 'just another story' for him. And 'I was not even on your horizon when the Wall came down, and then it is 30th anniversary and what does that mean to me?'
Those were interesting conversations we had, and he is right in a way. It is not the kind of history he has lived through. And obviously school and our family narratives have not given him the feeling of connectedness and enough context to put things into perspective.
I do hope our exhibition gets accepted for Houston, and I do hope I get to go, because it will be really interesting to be there and talk to people about it.

That very last minute – part 2

The South Korean and the German Patchwork Guilds are preparing for a joint exhibition with 30 quilts from 15 quilters each from these two countries on the theme/topic of the “divided country”. It was initiated from the Korean Guild and a bit over-intellectual about the sizes that the quilts were allowed to have – Germany’s quilts either 89 cm square or 90 cm square, depending on the reading of when the division of Germany ended, and no real size restrictions for Korea because right now nobody knows when Korea’s division will end. The German quilts will be displayed at the German Guild’s Patchworktage in June, then travel to Korea for a joint exhibition of both countries, and we are hoping that more venues will be found where both collections can be shown together. 

I had been invited to be one of the 15 people to contribute a quilt, and I had been thrilled to do so. In the beginning. 

My family is a family who was divided by the ‘iron curtain’, my aunt lived in the eastern part of Germany. My entire childhood is full of memories of my mother sending packages to the East, either her sister, or other friends. Coffee, textiles, no printed media, no western style music.  In appreciation we would get gifts of stationary with flower motifs which we hated, sometimes sheet music, classical records, sometimes books. Visiting my aunt was difficult because you had to get a permit, she was only allowed to come and visit once, when my grandparents were celebrating their 50^th wedding anniversary, but she had to come alone, her husband did not get permission. And many other stories like that.

So I thought I had a lot to say on this topic, but – as it turns out, when one is too emotionally involved, it is mighty hard to come up with a good quilt on that topic. The deadline was drawing nearer and nearer and still I had no real clue as to what to do. My aunt passed away a couple of years ago, otherwise we might have been able to make something together, she, too, was an avid textiler.

Something on the Green Belt (German explanation, English explanation), that area which was the zone around the border fortifications? After 40 years of little traffic or activity in that area it has since turned into a natural protected zone. 

Picture taken from here

But nothing came to my mind that I could turn into a quilt. (And today I saw on social media that Heidi Drahota, another of the 15 invited artists, used the Green Belt, so I am glad I did not stick with that.)

 

Finally I had the idea that I would put together a few handprinted fabrics of mine in a kind of earth-tone-mixture, 

and underlay that with a spiral in the colors of the German flags (both, East- and West-Germany had the some colors black-red-goldenyellow for their flags) to symbolize the way that the countries were intertwined, but also the confusion that the division created.

And I knew that I wanted to do something with the outline of the state/s, in reflector fabric, of which I still had a decent sized piece.

When I finished the ‘German flag colors’-fabric from which I would have taken the spiral, I realized that it looked a bit like a flag itself, though ‘turned around’. 

Despite the fact that flags have a front and a back and both of them are seen equally, printed representations of state flags always show an orientation where the pattern part is in the left upper corner. After sleeping one night about this I decided to dump the spiral idea and simply take the ‘flag’ as top layer.

I cut the outline of re-unified Germany from the reflector fabric, which was easy enough. Getting it onto the foundation was hellishly difficult and took a long time, almost as long as the separation itself, that’s what it felt like when I was trying to pin it down. And even then it wasn’t quite exact, when sewing, I had to make a few adjustments. But I got it done.

Adding at the top because despite repeated measurements taken, suddenly
the size was not correct anymore, not even when you make allowance for
89  or 90 cms.

My good friend Kathy Loomis criticized the idea of quilting words with a connection to spearation and reunification over it all, suggesting that would take too much attention away from th visual design. I am glad I heeded her advice because I would never have been able to finish in time if I had then started quilting text onto it all.

Quilting in relatively straight and parallel lines, not in the vertical, but horizontally. And then the problems started – and I am not going to go into them in any kind of detail. I had meant to finish the piece last week Monday, but despite the fact that I kept working on it every day after coming home from school it was Friday before I finally snipped the last thread. 

The former border is marked by red herringbone stitch. No political intention
related to the red - it just seemed slightly less obvious in this color context than
either black or yellow would have been.

Never before have I sent off a quilt so quickly after it was finished – a mere 40 minutes between that last thread and my trip to the post office. It is called "Wächst jetzt zusammen, was zusammen gehört?" ("are they now growing together as they belong together?"), which is a citation of a statement by Willy Brandt about the two Germanys, but put into a question format (here is a reconstruction of how that 'citation' came about - obviously he never really said that, and definitely not at the foot of the wall, as it is being narrated. Today we call that fake news). Frequently, even more than 25 years after reunification, we can still find instances where East and West have not yet adapted to each other. Division was severe, and it won't be that much longer now until reunification has lasted as long as the separation itself did. And only a few months before the Wall came down I still thought I would never live to see that in my lifetime!

I don’t credit myself for this wise saying, but “if it weren’t for the very last minute, a lot of things would never get done” surely is a very important statement.

And then despite the fact that I am worried about climate change etc. I boarded a plane on Saturday to go on vacation for a few days after finishing (and passing) my probation period in the training. I could write more about how far we might have entered into the very last minute before everything is too late in that respect, and yes, flying is not a climate-friendly way to travel… but I wanted to go somewhere warm and sunny and near a beach, and there are not that many options for doing that when starting from Germany in the end of March.

Mojo?

It had been a while since I had been visited by the quilting mojo. That is certainly partly due to the fact that working and studying full time requires a different kind of time management, and there is a family, too, that asks for and needs to be given attention, and household chores and and and... Amongst all that it is difficult to find time to even start giving though to quilting ideas, and then those need to brew, but when too many things are going on that kind of silent simmering can't go on because the burner gets pushced too far into the back corner. No oxygen will get to it there.
Another factor that influences this situation, however, I attribute to the fact that my recent quilts had got to be rather political in their statements about refugees, human rights, etc. Although I feel very strongly about these issues, and these messages - and I would never want to miss the quilts that emerged from that - the political situation here has become so frustrating and disappointing that I might wonder what use there is in stitching messages like that on textiles. Twice within a year hopes for improvements in politics after an election were thwarted. Pre-election promises were null and void after the election, or, worse, the coalition that would have been necessary to initiate changes did not happen. So my personal frustration has grown tremendously, my political messages would now get too complicated or too outspoken. No use putting that on textiles, as it contradicts my own definition of how a viewer should be able to see a piece of art, or perceive a message. Namely: not too blatantly. The viewer must be able to fill a piece of art with a meaning that might be very different from my own, I must not run around with a flagpole and drive my intention into their heads with force and without alternative.
So similarly as at the point when I made number XXXIX in the Play of Lines series and when the line designs had become too difficult and complicated, my series text messages might be either at its end, or it must find a reorientation of which I don't know at the moment where it will go. If it ever comes.
But I was happily scrapping away. On all levels. A bit of scrappy sewing on the side while my workshop students did not need me.

Small scale Underground Railroad blocks from leftovers from my
hand-dyed fabrics.

Knitting socks with partly leftover yarns...

... and knitting a blanket with the smallest left-overs from sock knitting that won't last far
in socks even.

On a more serious side, I was trying to make something for a wonderful inspirational challenge by Claire Passmore with the 12 by the Dozen group, when she set Shamia Hassani as the inspiration for the February reveal. But as I stated on their blog - I had an idea, I came up with a bit of a design, and then time failed me and it has not been executed yet. (It might, in a larger scale than the 40 x 40 cm, but that will have to wait.) And I was struggling with a piece I had been invited to for a joint German - South Korean exhibition on the condition of partitioned countries. When I first received the inviation I was thrilled - it is a life story of mine, with a family that was split up East and West, a grandfather who fled from the Russian occupied zone in the early fifties, to be reunited with his wife and two of the three daughters after the East German uprising in 1953. But the topic turned out very personal, I could not get going. So I labored, thought I would do something with 'Germany' as a layover and an inset spiral from Germany's flag colors or so and put the two different layers together, and then the outlines of the country over it in reflecting fabric. (Now that I write it here, it is sooo obvious that there would have been too many layers of meaning, but at that point I did not see that.)

This would have been the ground area of Germany, representing
the partition of forty years.

Left over from an exercise in a Nancy Crow workshop long
ago, a piece in red and black could easily be turned into a
German colors piece by adding some 'golden' yellow.

All of it hard going, and not very convincing to myself even. How was this going to turn into a good quilt? Then I had put the spiral-to-be part together and was going to send a photo to Kathy Loomis and realized that the fabric that was supposed to be the inset spiral really looked like a flag by itself, at least a bit.

I chucked the spiral idea and for the first time in a long while had a bit of exhilaration about my quilting. Even would have preferred to stay home and work on it rather than going to my studies, but that was not possible.
I cut the outlines. That was relatively easy.

But this thing, cut from a flat piece of reflecting fabric, is everything but flat when you are trying to put it onto another flat piece of fabric.

It rather misbehaves and I am making a fool of myself as I am working on attaching these two to each other. Process is slow, and time is running fast. But it feels good to have something going on in that mojo part of working with textiles. We will see where it goes.