New Work - Fever Dream

 

Fever Dream

It's time to share the final new work! This is Fever Dream. It's one of the quilts making its debut at the Virginia Quilt Museum in my solo show, Beyond the Blue: Contemporary Narrative Quilts by Sue Reno. The exhibit runs from August 16 - October 23, with a reception on September 23.

Fever Dream, detail 1

At times in the past several years I felt as though I'd been experiencing a fugue state, combining fear and anxiety with isolation and boredom. I worked through it with fevered print making, using botanical materials close at hand. I was not reticent in my embrace of bold shapes and even bolder colors. The top print in this quilt is a wet process print made with cyanotype and solarfast solar dye chemicals. The leaves are white mulberry and sumac, which I've worked with before, and big red mulberry leaves, which are also in the bottom panel. 

I have a childlike admiration of big leaves and use them whenever I can. White mulberry leaves are easy to recognize because they have three shapes all on the same branch--an oval, a mitten, and a double mitten. The trees were brought here in Colonial times to feed the nascent (and ultimately unsuccessful) silk industry, and they easily escaped cultivation. Today they are often found on verges and disturbed ground. The berries are much loved by birds and quilters out on a hike. The larger leaves of the native red mulberry have been a bit more elusive to find, for me, so this was a score.

Fever Dream, detail 2

As my days were spent printmaking, my evenings were spent obsessively hand-stitching hexagons. I've loved working with this shape ever since working on my James Webb Space Telescope quilts, and of course it's a common shape in traditional quilt design.

Fever Dream, detail 3

With all these big bold shapes going on, I thought it prudent to sneak in some quiet little wet cyanotype prints of snowdrops, but immediately set them to vibrating with monoprinted green striated panels I made.

Fever Dream, detail 4

No matter what is going on in my life or in the world around me, I always seem to end up making bright, cheerful, joyous quilts. I don't quite understand it, but I've done it again and here it is. This imagery is my gift to you, dear viewer. I hope in some small way it helps sustain you should you experience the occasional fevered dream.

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