TEXTILES
In 1996 I went to the USA to visit my grandmother and bought a box of 1930's fabric pieces in a thrift store. When I got home I began to make a quilt top based on a design of the 7 major planets in a Tree of Life design shown below.
By coincidence, while I was working on this project I was contacted by Tom Phillips, who wanted to make a large quilt top from prostitutes' phone box cards. Over the next two years we made three quilts. The finished 'Women's Work' quilt took just under a year to complete. Tom selected and cut cards to create the design, and I blu-tacked, transported, peeled, fused, pierced and stitched the pieces together by hand. The second quilt called 'Manpower' was larger and much more complex than the first, but as the technique was at full speed we finished it by the Autumn of 1997. Tom devised a third rather different quilt, based on his pastel drawing 'Tread Softly'. The lines come from the poem 'He Wishes For The Cloths of Heaven', by W.B.Yeates. I engaged some help at this point in the form of Alice King. Tom created letter templates and we worked from the pastel with our large scrap collections and made each letter to match the colour drawing. This quilt was sewn partly on machines, which made it much faster. The quilt was edged in grey Ohio Stars. It is now in the Ruth and Marvin Sackner Archive of Concrete and Visual Poetry in Miami, Florida.
Tom has written about these pieces on his website www.tomphillips.co.uk
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Click picture for close up view
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WOMEN'S WORK
Tom Phillips 1997. Paper and cotton 204cm sq.
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MANPOWER
Tom Phillips 1997. Paper and cotton 230cm sq.
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TREAD SOFTLY
Tom Phillips 1997. Mixed fabric quilt top, 198 x 264cm.
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KABBALAH QUILT
Alice Wood 1999. Vintage cotton fabric.
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EARTH detail
Alice Wood 1999. Vintage cotton fabric.
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JUPITER detail
Alice Wood 1999. Vintage cotton fabric.
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MOON detail
Alice Wood 1999. Vintage cotton fabric.
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SATURN detail
Alice Wood 1999. Vintage cotton fabric.
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SUN detail
Alice Wood 1999. Vintage cotton fabric.
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TREAD SOFTLY detail
Tom Phillips 1997. Mixed fabric quilt top.
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TREAD SOFTLY detail
Tom Phillips 1997. Mixed fabric quilt top.
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WOMEN'S WORK IN PROGRESS
Tom Phillips 1997. Artist L and Alice King R.
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