Back to the beginning, signifying disruption in a quilt

So I decided that maybe my banners will not make any difference, How can I nudge people to make our communities more welcoming places for refugees and asylum seekers?

There is not much that communicates welcome and comfort better than a patchwork quilt. A Grandmother’s flower garden quilt is instantly recognisable as quilt from a distance. So i began to collect cotton shirts that were not longer being worn, and used the fabric to make many hexagons. And put those on my design wall.

I wanted to explore ways of disrupting the comforting pattern, in the same way our lives are disrupted by flags, newspaper headlines, and fake news. First I used a larger plain hexagon to disrupt the pattern in a similar way to a pebble that gets in your shoe. Then I became more literal, using newspaper hexagons and pieces of ‘banner’.

This is beginning to look like a possible way forward, so I began the process of mosaic patchwork (also called English paper piecing), where each cloth hexagon is wrapped over a smaller paper hexagon, they are stitched together. Then the hexagons can be stitched together., making the traditional flowers of the Grandmother’s Flower Garden quilt. By now I have enough shirts to make some decisions about colour. Unsurprisingly, as they are men’s shirts, I have many blue ones, but also a couple of dark red ones I shall use for the centres of the flowers. And plenty of white shirts too for the ‘footpaths’ between the flowers.

The piecing papers are all newspaper, or old envelopes. The newspapers all feature articles about the issues that disrupt our thinking - war, corruption, climate breakdown ….. The papers will be left in, to help viewers understand what issues drove the making of the work. Some of the hexagons have been reversed so that the papers show on the front, adding to the disruption. I am sitting with this on my wall for a while I decide where to go next.