In Dreams I Drifted Away -Part 2

 While I was intermittently working on In Dreams I Drifted Away, the opportunity to attend the James Webb Space Telescope Artist Project came up. I was soon heavily invested in making Luminosity. (You can read about the NASA visit, the quilt, and the exhibit by clicking the JWST tab at the top, or go here.) The centerpiece of that work was a set of hand-stitched silk hexagons representing the telescope mirrors:

Prior to this I had never worked with English paper piecing, but it was the perfect technique for this application. I enjoyed it enough that I began piecing more hexagons, just to have a hand sewing project while waiting around for an auto oil change and such. Some of the fabrics I used were leftover dye prints from making Luminosity, because they were at hand. You can see parts of the telescope imagery in the pink and orange hexagons:

As I worked I thought about how my my work to date about the Susquehanna River has grown from my personal detailed observations of it, in various states, and from various locales. 52 Ways to Look at the River in particular was about these observations. Working on the JWST project has expanded my outlook, and I realized that there is a wealth of observation and knowledge about the river that has been recorded by scientific methods. As one small example, I happened upon this video about satellite EO-1 that includes an image of the Susquehanna from 2011.

This type of observation and data has never been more important, and would seem to be at increasing risk of being unavailable for continued research. So my hexagons in this work represent the satellites and other technology that we collectively as a species are reliant on.

Now that my concept is clear, it will be easy to expand on it. These gelli plate prints I made last year are going to fit in perfectly.