Quilts on Stage

To win back his beloved Ariadne and release Athens from its bonds, prince Theseus must enter King Minos’s formidable labyrinth at Knossos and slay the Minotaur – half man-half bull – imprisoned within.

Handel’s Arianna in Creta was firt performed in London in 1734. Stephen Taylor, Director of the 2024 production for Innsbruck Festival der Alten Music, requested my Meander hand quilt as a feature in the stage design, to represent the labyrinth; itself an eternal and universal symbol of life’s puzzles and choices. Ariadne’s red thread becomes Theseus’s redemptive cypher, leading him back to the world.

Meander was inspired by Anni Albers’s Red Meander weaving of 1954. Anni and her husband, Josef, having fled Nazi Germany and found themselves among progressive artists and emigrés at Black Mountain College in the United States, became engrossed by pre-Columbian crafts as containing the seeds of modern abstraction. The artisanal experience of moulding – and, to Anne’s mind in particular, weaving – material and spirit into plastic form became a driving preoccupation. While the labyrinth itself – the maze – appears across pre-historic continents as a figure, Anni’s has the Mayan look (and I believe she made thirteen trips to Mexico). I studied the rules of her pattern – a single meandering line, figure and ground strictly equal in weight – and contrived my own in 10cm square units.

Above: Il Sonno (Morpheus, the god of sleep) visits Teseo on the eve of his mission, with premonitions of  slaughter and redemption,. Photos by Birgit Gufler.

Meander, 2019; linen and cotton patchwork, hand quilted and bound with silk; 240 x 200cm.