Looking out over water every day when we got the theme “Reflection” made it natural for me to chose reflections on water as my visual. I was doing an artist residency close to my hometown, on the coast of Nova Scotia. The setting was beautiful, I worked in a barn overlooking the ocean and an inlet (see photos in my last blog post). I was working there every day for four weeks, looking out over the water, sometimes in bright sunlight, and sometimes in cloudy, overcast weather, and once during a thunder storm. The water looks different in all those different settings. I wanted to capture the different colours of the water and the way the reflections of poles get broken by waves.

As I was monoprinting fabrics during the artist residency I wanted to use that technique to print my water fabrics. Using a large Plexiglas plate as well as a Gelli printing plate I selected the colours and mixed them on my printing plates. I used tools and my fingers to get the wave structures. Pulling prints has always an element of surprise, but I was happy with the results, and I like the way the edges of the prints are still visible. 

 The quilting was done with a selection of metallic threads and it took me a long time to get it done as I was constantly dealing with shredding and broken threads, wrong tension and just general frustration. But I managed to work slowly through these problems and am glad I did as the result is what I was hoping for.

 The colours range from grey-green to vibrant turqouise and pale purple, to capture the water in different light.

 I’m grateful for the support of my local community, as that made the artist residency possible and the response of the community has been great. I’m so glad to live near the ocean!

Wave Optics

w 27″ x h 40″

monoprinted cotton, acrylic paints, metallic threads

pieced and free motion quilted