4x6 Exchange

I was one of the 1000 lucky participants who signed up for the latest project by the Brooklyn Art Library. You can read all about the 4x6 Exchange project here, although all the 1000 places are now filled. The idea is that you make a flat 4 x 6 piece of work, really a postcard, send it off to the Brooklyn Art Library and in the fullness of time you will receive one of these pieces from another participant, while someone else will get your piece! Simple. Several of my friends are also playing and wouldn't it be fun if we received one from each other! There's a 1 in 1000 chance which is at least better than the lottery.

The only thing I wrestled with was the flat part! What, no beads, no fabric layers, no fat juicy embellishments? Oh dear! So for once I was reduced to using paper (can you imagine that!). I used watercolour paper and had a merry old time spashing, sponging, stencilling, stamping etc. with acrylic paints and inks till I came up with the background for this piece (I actually made a very large sheet and cut a 4x6 piece from it). I had written a poem for one of my Journal Quilts and used it on this piece too. The text reads:

why solitude?

invisible wings carried me

into myself forever

The images of wings and angel (all from Alpha Stamps) were added as shown. as well as the vintage French stamp.

Somehow I wanted to show that I'm actually a textile artist. This was specially important to me today, as someone told me yesterday that textile art doesn' have the emotional content of painting. It really is so sad as well as extremely ignorant, that this sort of thinking is still going strong even after the many years that we, textile artists, have been fighting against it!! Anyway, in order to get in that sewn line I layered the piece with another piece of watercolour paper and zigzag stitched around the edges as shown as well as around the poem.