"Keep Your Mach Up, Always Check Your Six" ©2010 Ayn Hanna, 41"x42", Textile Painting (Cotton Fabric, Fabric Paint & Ink, Cotton Thread, Cotton Batting)
Openings and Closings
“You are a Navy Quilt Challenge Winner!”
What a nice message to find in my email inbox on this Veterans’ Day. “Keep Your Mach Up, Always Check Your Six” is the winner of the “Best Use of Aviation Theme” Award. Both of the quilts I made for this Navy Quilt show were inspired by and in honor of Navy Pilot and Commander Captain Bill Catlett.
You can see all of the award winning quilts in the show here and the full list of venues where this group of quilts will be on tour throughout 2010 – 2011 here. The debut showing of the whole quilt collection is this weekend, 11/12-11/13, at the National Naval Aviation Museum in Pensacola, FL.
While the Navy Quilt Show and year-long tour is kicking off this weekend, 2 other shows that I have artwork in are coming to a close. The Drawing in the Expanded Field Show at CSU’s Hatton Gallery will end tomorrow, and the Simply irRESISTible Show at Some Things Looming Gallery in Reading, PA ends on Sunday. The Evolutions Show at the Rocky Mountain Quilt Museum ended recently as well, so I’m now starting to get my work returned from these shows.
It’s fun to get these pieces back and have a chance to spend a little time with them again, revisiting and reviewing the work in the context of who/where I was when I made them compared to who/where I am now and the work that I currently have in progress in the studio. These pieces are visible records of my process of becoming.
Morphing and Shifting – We’re not the same people we were just 5 minutes ago
Change is everywhere – days are noticeably shorter now, winter has arrived with our first snow of the season, a change in my day job role, and completing Wall Drawing #3.
My artwork and I are shifting too. Supported by the change in weather, I’m drawn inward toward cocooning in my studio, allowing myself some intuitive drawing and play time, exploring fabric surface design techniques that best convey my visual messages.
I’m focusing on several new small scale pieces, extending my tangled web series. It’s all about intuitive drawing and mark-making through surface design, with intent to also eventually incorporate some hand-stitching as well. Here’s a first look at the first few of these new small pieces in progress:
TW 6 (state 1) ©Ayn Hanna, 17"x10"
TW5 (state 1) ©Ayn Hanna, 17"x10"
TW 7 (state 1) ©Ayn Hanna, 17"x10"
[…] 2010, when I was doing web research to find images of Navy planes while working on the design of the quilts I made for the Navy Quilting Challenge, I stumbled upon some b&w aerial images of abandoned Naval airfields and was struck with how […]