March First Friday: Meditations on patchwork, collage and the grid

First Friday has come and gone without much event, which is not to say that the evening wasn't busy or that we didn't have lots of visitors.

In the midst of other projects, I've been working on some hand-made paper collages that I call Meditations (one was hanging for First Friday). I don't have any photos to post yet because the work is being professionally mounted for re-framing (and as prep for a decent photo). The Meditations are grids of inch squares of handmade paper layered on a painted ground. They're a bit like paper quilts but with a mixture of wax and other paint media.

The process and ideas are extensions from the aerials made from paper / cloth covered panels and the stitched aerials. The difference is a more structured and limited format (the grid). But all of these modes are still about the construction of a surface built from a body of coalesced materials that are molded together (almost sculpturally). There's lots of polishing and finishing that draws from ideas in painting though the processes are very different than most painting or drawing in that mark-making, the hand and image are less relevant than the surface and the object itself.

Working with similar ideas, though polishing the surface through photography, Gwenn Thomas arranges fabrics into patchwork patterns and then uses photography as her finishing tool. Here is an untitled piece where the depth of the fabrics and the shadows they cast contrast in relief to the flattening medium of photography. As such, the arrangements become representations of an object that never was constructed.