More strange bedfellows: quilts and graffiti

This is my new favourite colour box, a delicious array of cans of Montana spraypaint. All packed up to take to my largest quilt project to date.

Now I finally get my chance to do what I’ve been dreaming of for years:  blanketing a big, blank white concrete wall with a colourful quilt of triangles — with permission and for the long term, for a change.  (My previous secret adventures in unauthorized craft-tagging in the public sphere were painted out within weeks.)

How a quilt will read when spraypainted on a concrete wall I have no idea. I’ve googled images using ‘quilt’ and ‘graffiti’ and ‘mural’ and haven’t found any spraypainted quilts — at least, none that were created specifically with quilts in mind.

My main challenge, besides enduring working under a respirator for about the same number of hours it takes me to make a queen-sized quilt, is ensuring that the field of bright colours and simple geometry doesn’t scream ‘daycare centre. ‘ The colour and pattern choices make all the difference between creating a one-dimensional jumble of happy triangles with what I’m really trying to achieve here: a three-dimensional appearance and a vibrating, discordant colourway, some element of surprise, a reason for the eye to take a lingering second look.

I’ll get the ‘why’ part overwith here: This media mash-up of the visual of tactile, comforting quilts and the harsh process of spraypainting concrete infrastructure stems from my compulsion to visually link the personal with the public, the domestic with the industrial, the feminine with the masculine. Enough said.

But the excitement (mixed with a little fear) about this undertaking is in the risk involved. 

Unlike putting together a quilt, which is pretty much pre-planned (all the fun is in choosing the colour and pattern and the rest is pretty much mechanical, which is why so many quilts are started but abandoned), the spraypaint process is additive and more open-ended. It could all go sideways. Or it could emerge as something entirely unexpected and new. 

Hopefully this will turn out to be the best of both distinct worlds: the pleasing geometry and colour-play of quilts and all their cozy references mixed with the hard-surface, large-scale properties of murals made by spraypaint-wielding graffiti artists.

I’m in the thick of it now, relying heavily on my experience making complex quilts to reduce the intimidating scale of the job. It’s all about focusing in, taking it on one block at a time, trying not to think about the work ahead. Eating that elephant one bite at a time.