I've Started...

so I'm keeping going. Yesterday, I worked on a second quilt, 'Lost In Translation', since I was having such a good time with 'Mixed Mythologies' (which is demanding hand stitch, so a photo may be Some Time In Coming...). I used the monoprinted lutradur produced by the paper here, and the . I combined it with a vibrant African inspired commercial print, which I'd had for a very long time, given by a fellow quilter in the US in a mixed bag of swap stuff. I couldn't work out what to do with it...until I combined it with the lutradur. It was intruiging... I could see most of the pattern through the lutradur, but not all of it, and stitching into it produced a pattern of its own, based on the original, but not identical by any means. That reminded me of translation work (I trained originally as a translator); when you translate, you sometimes distort the meaning of a piece because rendering it exactly is not possible for any number of good, sound, linguistic or cultural reasons. Hence the title, 'Lost In Translation'. But despite the fact you can never render anything completely in translation, there are lots of moments in there that shine as clearly as the original (or they do if the translator is any good at the job!); hence the distressing of the lutradur to show little bits of the original.

Perhaps that layer of meaning would not be clear to anyone without an explanation/artists' statement, but it is clear to me...I wonder if it works for anyone else. I'd be interested to hear what you think of the piece. The first picture is the whole piece, the second, a detail shot.