I have recently become involved with The Bushwick Book Club, a group that reads books monthly then writes songs to perform on stage for a one-time show. I want to create a project that catalogs the first year of their book choices. Crazy quilts, block quilts, even non-traditional piecing didn't seem to address what I was really interested in. The feeling of being consumed in another world, becoming familiar with unfamiliar people and places through text. My fascination with location, home, and land boundaries (especially in regards to my move to Seattle) seemed like a completely separate inspiration until I was driving to work this morning.
My long commute (in Seattlite terms)from Columbia City to Woodinville every morning brings me from my 1 bedroom apartment off of a highly populated main drag to an A-frame cabin in the woods. I easily separate my home life from my work life with such a drastic environment change. I feel the same shift when I sit down to read a novel and enter the world an author has created. I lose myself in the character's dilemmas and neighborhoods. The same feeling occurs to me every month at BWBC. There is such a strong support between all the artists, the Can-Can transforms to the setting of our novel through music, costumes, and lyrics. I want to illustrate that organic connection we all form between novels, Seattle, Bushwick, and the artist community.
The quilt is going to be a map to my world through BWBC. Tralfamadore, Flourin and Gilder, Narnia, King Arthur's court, Bushwick Brooklyn, the Can-Can.... all synthesized into the connections I draw between each as a map. I will explore ways to connect land and places that don't exist except for in stories with places we live in and know, how to create a map to something undefinable in our everyday life, a non-traditional connection of themes through physical representation. A map to our Bushwick Book Club.
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