Allez les Bleus! Part II

Three new hand quilt designs, Quad, Penta and Perpendot, are on display for London Craft Week in the gallery at Connolly in Mayfair.

Quad takes inspiration from 1960s relief artworks, in particular the work of the British artist Victor Passmore. The design is a rhythmic arrangement of rectangles which uses occlusion and colour variegation to muddle figure and ground; densely quilted in quadratic spirals.

Penta was prompted by my stumbling upon a photo of the lobby floor tiles devised by Marjorie Rice at the Mathematical Association of America a few years ago while researching a talk on pattern for a group of year 11 school students. While I was vaguely aware that you cannot tesselate (that is, join together without gaps or overlaps) a regular pentagon, this discovery introduced me to the tessellation of irregular pentagons. My design is number 3 of the 15 irregular pentagons known to tesselate. No mystery how – three of them form the hexagon that we recognise from traditional patchwork – but I love how the pattern is veiled by a baroque appearance of asymmetry. This one is quilted in a loose pentagonal latticework.

The third design, Perpendot, is an enlarged detail from an improvised quilt from about five years ago, with sections re-improvised in the Connolly indigo stuffs. It is quilted to echo the circle, square and triangle – elemental units gone awry – of which the design is composed.

Fissure (2019) is also on display – a big ‘crazy’ quilt improvised in a variety of blues including cotton, linen, silk and velvet.

The exhibition Indigo is open from 10–18 May in the first floor gallery at Connolly, 4 Clifford Street, London W1. The quilts are for sale by Connolly.

Quilts on Stage

Allez les Bleus! Part I