Life in the Anthropocene by Sue Sherman

 

This quilt started out as an idea that would not go out of my head.  A bunch of animals standing on various platforms in space – clearly not places they could live for any length of time, the point being that the way humans encroach on habitats of wild animals does not consider whether the resulting ecosystem will work for them.  The image seemed absurd to me, and I resisted the urge to turn it into a piece of art because it just didn’t seem that it could make sense to a viewer without a lot of explanation.  But the idea wouldn’t go away, and so I got out a pencil and a really long ruler and started working with vanishing points on a large piece of paper. After several modifications of the horizon, the vanishing point locations, and the shapes, I settled on a version in two-point perspective with three complex 3D shapes that complemented each other in space but did not touch.  On a couple of the large flat surfaces I made little cubbies for smaller animals.

Before drawing any animals I worked out the relative sizes that the animals would have to be at various points in the perspective, which is not as hard as it looks.  All the vertical lines connect parts of a shape that are the same distance from the viewer.  Any horizontal or vertical surfaces are wider towards the front and narrower towards the back – I used the ratio of the relative widths/heights of these sections to figure out the ratios the animals would need to have to each other.  And on top of that, I needed to look up the sizes of each animal in real life so they would all be of the correct size relative to each other.

Next I went into my database of photographs from my travels to find wild animals that would work on the quilt.  It was helpful that the background shapes have some “floor” surfaces above and some below the horizon, so I could place the various animals on the shapes according to the viewpoint from which they were photographed.  I created a line drawing of each animal on tracing paper, and stuck them on the background using repositionable tape.  I had to dig deep for the photographs as it needed quite a lot of different animals to fill the space.  Some of the images weren’t very good, but it turned out they were good enough to use at this small scale.

Next I used coloured pencils to transfer the entire image onto white cotton treated with soda ash, and brought the images to life using paint brushes to apply Procion MX dyes thickened with sodium alginate.  The thing with dye is that once it is applied it is really difficult/impossible to remove, and there is no painting one thing “in front of” another thing.  You need to dye paint the thing in the front first and then carefully dye paint the thing behind it by filling in the negative space.  For example, if you look at the ferns next to the zebras, the ferns were created first and then I applied the orange of the planter all around the fronds using a very fine brush.

Once all the animals were created using the thickened dye, I filled in the geometric shapes behind them, and then the sky-coloured background.

Quilting this piece was fun!  My quilting and thread painting are one –the thread you see in the front goes through all layers to the back, which means that I need to pay a lot of attention to keeping the layers nice and flat.  I start in the middle and work out, and change thread frequently in an effort to keep the quilted area fairly round.  Each animal has its own approach to thread painting, to try to get the fur, feathers or scales as realistic as possible. The larger animals were done using trilobal polyester, but for the smaller ones I needed to use 100wt. silk to get the required definition.  This was also true for the giraffe, so that I could make realistic thread-painted fur on its individual spots.

I would like to draw your attention to the beautiful rhino at the very front.  His name is Baraka and he lives in the Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Kenya.  Baraka lost one eye in a fight and lost sight in the other one due to a cataract.  (With apologies to Baraka, I have flipped his image to fit the perspective -- it’s actually his other eye that’s missing!)  It seemed somehow poetic to have a blind rhino at the precipice, symbolically leading the entire group into the unknown.  Baraka is also a very hopeful image:  he is especially vulnerable in a country where rhino poaching is a constant threat, yet he continues to thrive due to the care and support of humans who are trying to make a difference. 

This piece has a lot of background, and I struggled to come up with something meaningful to put there.  All-over wavy lines or swirls just wouldn’t be enough to complement the images in the foreground.  It seemed that the unseen animals, the ones that have already gone extinct due to human activity, needed to be a part of the story.  Not being able to take my own photographs of extinct animals, I could not create their ghostly images in thread, so I quilted their names all over the blue sky background in various sizes of cursive writing.  Researching all these names was humbling and sad. 

It was tough to come up with a name for this art quilt – Life in the Anthropocene seemed to nail down what I was trying to say, but I worried that people would need to look it up.  On the other hand, this unfamiliar word is a great conversation starter, and looking it up may help viewers learn a little more about why scientists are saying we have moved away from the Holocene Epoch and into the Anthropocene.

The finished piece is 63” high x 73” wide.  If you missed it at the Branson Quilt Show last month perhaps you can see it at the upcoming Paducah Quilt Show later this month.

You can see more of my work at www.sueshermanquilts.com.