I decided as part of my continuing series on Identity to repurpose a pprevious piece of work. It was called Pathways and I made it in 2017.
The colour in this photograph is not right. It should be a warmer beige. However I can't rephotograph it because I took it apart some time ago. My plan back then was to make the squares into a book.
However I've now decided to make it into a hanging. I've bondawebbed the squares onto calico and put wadding and a back on it.
I was planning to machine stitch wavy lines between the squares before I shared it here. But that didn't happen. You'll have to come back sometime to see it.
Our photography challenge this month was to fill the frame with one colour. Finding something interesting to photograph was always going to be challenging. I didn't want to take a photograph of a painted wall.
On the very last day of our trip to Australia last year, in fact on the way to the airport, we visited an art gallery, and to the bemusement of my husband and son, I bought this:
It's a beautiful rusty music stave that looks a bit like barbed wire. Beauty is obviously in the eye of the beholder.
I could see it as part of a textile piece although I had no idea what.
Several months on I was discussing with a friend that ideas could come out of anywhere. On my way home I turned on the radio and one of my favourite pieces of music was playing: Capriccio Italien.
In my 40s I remember telling my mother for the first time how much I loved this piece of music. She was greatly surprised and told me about a popular song in August 1949 that the nurses were singing in the days around and after my birth. It was The Echo Told Me a Lie.
I started looking at the histories of these two pieces of music. It turns out that Tchaikovsky was in Italy and heard a folk tune he really liked and put it into his composition.
The folk song's chorus has these words: Pretty girl with a blonde braid, young men make rounds for you.
Neither dad wants nor mom does how shall we make love? Neither dad wants nor mom does how shall we make love?
Fortunately for us all, the 1949 adaptation only took the tune, not the words. And so we come to the song The Echo Told Me a Lie.
You might be wondering by now, when am I going to get to the textile!
Now!
I decided I would write my history with these pieces of music onto calico with a marker pen. I also used a thermofax screen of music notes to print with. Then, as ever, I cut up the fabric. I cut it into small squares and then pieced them back together randomly.
So here it is: Distant Echoes: The Fabric of Memory
