Solar System Quilt, made in 1876 by Ella Harding Baker. Image from the National Museum of American History.
A Genome quilt by Beverly St. Clair. The artist uses quilt blocks to encode sequences of DNA.
Since I started working on this webzine, I’ve been looking for examples of the kind of art I want to showcase. I sat down and brainstormed the kinds of cross-genre art I’m interested in. One of the first things I thought of was science quilts, quilts made either to illustrate a point in science or using a scientific concept as inspiration. After all, quilts are tesselations of the plane, divisions of space in a regular way, and so essentially a mathematical concept to begin with. And another thing that I want to do in this magazine is find people who are out there doing interesting things outside of the mainstream. So I thought that I’d go to some of the big craft sites and look for science quilts.
Ebay: nothing.
Etsy: nothing.
Deviant Art: not really.
I started thinking of SF art shows that I’ve been to… surely, there were some quilts there. I know there are a lot of textile artists in the SF community. Surely, some of those quilts did not feature unicorns or fairies. I found a very small number of examples of what I was looking for… two of them are the lovely quilts pictured above. Then I thought that if I want to see them, perhaps I need to ask for them. I would like quilters to send me pictures of any science related quilt along with a brief bio. I’ll put the best ones together into a gallery with your info. I will pick the one that interests me the most, and that person will win $100, and I will profile them on the site. I don’t care about the size of the original quilt since I’m only interested in a picture. The quilt doesn’t have to be made for this search. I will take entries until the end of 2008. Then, in January, I will post the results.
Send photos or contact me with questions at dawnwich at yahoo.com.
One Response to “Searching for Science Quilts”
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
Hi – You might want to look here for an interesting quilt.
http://quiltergeek.blogspot.com/2008/05/secret-messages-morse-code-quilt.html