Pat Forster
I carry a love of Geometry into my quilting, from a past life as a mathematics teacher in high school and university sectors. Many of my art quilts have been inspired by fractals including those published by Jeffery Ventrella, Robert Fauthauer and Douglas McKenna. I say 'inspired by' because rather than copy others' constructions, I take them in directions that suit the quilt medium, and the designs rarely involve more than two or three iterations of a rule. Recently I came up with the idea of using the traditional Drunkards Path block (quarter of circle inscribed in a square) and nesting and rotating it to form designs, which number twelve to date, two of which I have entered into this exhibition. All twelve are on my website.
The design with six witches in the abstract emerged from playing with different orientations of the traditional Drunkards Path quilt block (quarter of a circle in a square). Eventually, I applied the method of edge-rewriting described in 'The Algorithmic Beauty of Plants' by Prusinkiewicz and Lindenmayer, then iterated the edge rule once. I named the quilt Witching Hour since that is the hour when, in folklore and the Western Christian tradition, witches and other supernatural things came out. Witches are also associated with Halloween, the eve of All Hallows Day, another Western Christian observance, hence the choice of black and orange – Halloween colours.
Fish-feeding in Darwin, Australia results in a frenzy of heads, fins and tails churning the water. The quilt design evokes, for me, memories of the frenzy. The quilt consists of nine blocks, royal blue and turquoise, some with royal blue as the dominant colour and others with turquoise dominant. I generated the block pattern by nesting traditional Drunkards-path blocks (quarter of a circle in a square), which I sequentially rotated by 180 degrees. The overall design emerged from playing with the nine blocks.