Last Spring I joined a virtual workshop led by David Owen Hastings, named: Inspired by art. As inspiration source, I chose the super detailed maps by graphic designer Thomas Ashley. The workshop was interesting and comprehensive, and it activated visions since its beginning: it started with a wonderful imagery that David shared from his countryside!

As a workshop exercise, I drafted a fuzzy section of a map on my design wall.
I recalled the awesome works of gorgeous map quilters such as Alicia Merret, Leah Evans and Niraja Lorenz and, with some doubts, I asked myself: why making one more map?
In a conversation after the workshop, David encouraged me: he was very kind, and the map idea found quiet settlement in some place of my mind.

During this Summer, the occasion to elaborate this subject topic came again, thanks to the game launched by Quilt Improv Studio, Pop improv challenge: I randomly started piecing some acid green fields. And suddenly, from my design wall, a message appeared so strong that I didn’t dare to touch the pins and to adjust the vision. I found reply to my earlier question: “It depends on what you want to say with your map”.

This is the story of my quilt made for the Pop Improv game. Its title is: “River gone green”.

This Summer our family holidays found destination in Spain, to the ancient city of Valencia.
Valencia was founded as a Roman colony in 138 BC. Building site were the banks of the River Turia, alluvial silts accumulated on the floodplain formed in the lower course of the river, which were highly fertile.
Valencia today is one of the world’s top rank global cities: a primary node in the global economic network. But centuries of development changed its relationship with Nature very deeply. Strong growth at the sides of its riverbanks found its limit on 14 October 1957, when the Great Flood of Valencia flooded large parts of the city of Valencia. As a reaction, Turia river was diverted and its coexistence with the citizens found an end. The old course of the river has been turned into a central green space for the city: a cultural attraction known as the Garden of the Turia, which I myself walked in, smitten by surprise.

Acid and saturated colors typical of Pop Art aesthetics, as requested by Quilt Improv Studio challenge, proved perfect to convey through my quilt the message of what happens when commodification of Nature hits an extreme, such as in the story of Turia river bed, not anymore filled with water, but now gone green. Like a glowing ghost of its former stream shape.

Today, awareness that rivers are continuously changing landscapes, which can’t be frozen into a fixed narrow stream (as it happened to the vast majority of the rivers in the world), is well consolidated in the scientific community: leaving room for rivers to flow and flood is safer than building houses too close to riverbanks. The few remaining examples of rivers having a course that still preserves its natural features, such as my beloved Tagliamento river (the “king of the Alps” worth of getting Unesco tutelage), are studied and imitated during projects for restoring damaged river’s health. Didn’t you expect that honoring the wilderness of rivers would also make safer the communities around them?

I share my quilting studio with DaveTheWave, who collects there his tools for electronic music improvisation, and sometimes I enjoy piecing during his composition hours.
His tunes are a perfect companion for sewing with a rhythm: not only I respond better to the emerging shapes on my design wall, but also I feel confident in changing my texture while keeping unity in the overall piece.

Music improvisation and quilting improvisation are similar: when you find a good balance between control and intuitive response, you are in the flow, you are connected with the medium, the eye switches easily from zoom detail to overview check, and repetitions with variation can proceed.
Where can I learn from, if I want to practice the feeling of improvisation? Keeping a good link between body and mind reminds me of training in sports: you have learnt the basics and, during the match, you seamlessly adjust your strategy according the movements of the team.

Some months ago I was walking to the city center, and I raised my eyes upwards. There was a beautiful intense blue sky, and many perfect white clouds. It was just a small field among the houses, but it gave me sense of the beauty of our remote roof on top. I decided, then, that I wanted to make a quilt out of these colors.

I talked in this earlier blog post about the start of this work. I selected all my favorite blue fabrics, and I combined them such to obtain this same feeling impressed in my memory. I wanted to render the sense of expansion, but I realized that I needed a kilometers wide quilt… it was required a real size effect!

I finally settled for keeping just the meaning, distilled into a small detail.

Now my quilt is finished, and I can keep between both hands a tiny symbol of something located so remote. I gave it title: “The space between the clouds”.

It was for several days, that a blue sky quilt idea was floating in my mind.
I resisted for all those days to the temptation to start it, because I was in the middle of other projects. A completely different color occupied my sewing table, the supersaturated red of my monochrome quilt, still to be finished.
I managed to work according to my real preference: one quilt at a time.

Then, my quilting table became free.
I started.
And I submerged for a full weekend on my new blue project, without breathing fresh air for hours.
It fullly captured me.
So strong was the effect of full immersion into a stage of new creation, that every other activity in the queue disappeared from my radar.
I even forgot for one full day to send the announcement of the new quilt+painting gallery that was in preparation here in my hometown!
(Well, the gallery announcement has just been launched – read here if you are in north east Italy, and you consider visiting this super special event soon!).

Blue and white fragments continued to get attached to one another on the design wall, when, suddenly, my composition was not working anymore.
Too big.
The clouds, inspired to the late summer sky visions stored in my mind, needed to become too large… maybe kilometers large… like in the real life.
Not working, not working image at all.

The splash on the design wall soon turned out too busy, giant and pixellated.
I remixed, I ripped sections, I abandoned the initial purpose… but there was no way out.
Until, like a casual gesture, I placed my jelly roll blue strips on the design wall. Strips in series, like a color check, like a grid.
And, surprise-surprise… I started to see my work clearly again.
Thanks to the presence of the grid, I suddenly understood what was happening to my work.

— Alert: engineer nerd content below —

I involuntarily created an “interference grid”.
Like the one I used during my optoelectronic engineering studies… when a laser beam passed through a filter, and became transformed into physically meaningful patterns…
This grid acted, indeed, as a filter.
It helped me to extract mosaic cell scale.
To separate portions of the mosaic having different appearances.
It distilled the randomness of my work into some sub-series having a meaning of their own.

Now, I have decided a possible way on: to use only some portions of my work, to simplify it.
The image should become more readable.
Or at least, the idea returned readable for my mind. I see again a number of possible paths for the progression of my work.

I don’t know if the above story is understandable or even interesting as a quiltmaking phase.
But for me it was important.
The rest, still needs to be written…

When I started discussing with my quilting friends Carla and Giovanna, about the new game to be proposed as a Quilt Improv Studio challenge, I was reading the book Abstract Art. Carla’s proposal to try quilting a monochromatic work was perfectly fitting with the chapter I was reading then: the history of American Monochrome paintings.

At the time to start my monochrome quilt, I decided to experimented a bit with extremes.
I kept the shapes to a minimum (a good occasion to discover the difficulties of minimalism).
As in the monochromatic painting experiments, I focused on surface texture, quilting red on red, going narrow up to matchstick style.

At a certain point, the differences introduced in my quilt started to be barely visible even for me… and this reminded me of a photo galley I made twenty years ago, participating to a science congress on nanotechnologies, dealing with objects having size sometimes too small for being resolved by visible light.

Well… red is the color at the gate of visible light wavelength.
Thus, I decided that my red quilt had gained grades to be dedicated to all the above.

My monochrome quilt is titled “Threshold of the visible”. It makes me think of my experience with microscopy and surface characterization, of the American monochrome texture paintings, and of the wavelength where we start to see red: 740 nanometers!