Colour is so much about our personal perceptions, how we view our work and the world around us.  I like strong contrast and I love to challenge myself to try and arrived at a colour combination that shifts under the eye of the viewer, making you unsure whether you are looking at the positive or negative, a foreground or background object.  You can do this by working with the opposites on the colour wheel – red and green, blue and orange, yellow and violet, layering them and putting them in close proximity.

I am short sighted and wear prescription glasses.  When I am working on a piece I have it on my design wall.  I find that if I take my glasses off and walk out of the room, then turn around and view it from a distance, I often see things jumping around in the work that I didn’t deliberately create. On summer nights I have been known to go outside and view things through the lighted, uncurtained window, in order to change my perspective.

For this challenge, I had in mind two current celestial happenings, the Geomagnetic storms we are experiencing around the world and the close passing to Earth of the Devil Comet, aka 12P/Pons-Brooks, the first time since 1954, which was a couple of years before I was born.  Given that it will be another 71 years before it is back, I guess it is likely that, for me at least, it is a once in a lifetime event.

I wasn’t ready to undertake the Aurora Australis in fabric, though the intense emerald green and magenta of the photographs published online were definitely tempting, so I attempted a comet, roaring and tumbling and powering through space, shedding ice and dust and rock to create the tail of the Devil Comet.  Then I looked at some of my abandoned pieces and realised they were similar in style but a different colour, less orange and more green.  I spliced them together to form my parallel universe.

I live away from the lights of a town, so unless it is overcast, the Milky Way, the planets and the moon are usually visible.  We had a great view of Halley’s Comet in 1986.   It’s a bit too cold tonight to stand outside and view my little parallel universe through a lighted window, but I’ll keep looking over time to see what is hidden in there.  Might take a while, there is a whole universe to see.

Completed:        May 2024

Dimensions:      99 mm H X 965 mm W

                        39” H X 38” W

Materials:          Commercial printed cotton fabric; applied surface of strips of new

and recycled cotton fabric; 3M Reflective Tape; Hi Viz vest.

Technique:        Raw-edge appliqué with applied vliesofix. Freehand stitched quilted pattern over the entire surface using a small longarm.