On a visit to New York City in the late 1990s, a friend gave me an arresting piece of linen and cotton ikat fabric (thanks again, JS). Its diagonal black and white stripes matched up perfectly with my attraction to that kind of assertive, graphic patterning. Laid out flat, the fabric’s pattern was orderly and predictable; crumpled up it became energized, disruptive, and hyper-kinetic, reminiscent of World War 1 "dazzle camouflage" patterns. I wasn’t sure what I’d do with it, if anything, but appreciated the gift.

When I was setting out on my exploration of the digital interface after 2002, the first hurdle was learning both the hardware and software technologies for which I’d had relatively little prep. It was intense but enriching, and the help of savvy students, both graduate and undergraduate, made it more so. We figured out together how things worked under the best conditions, how they did or didn’t work when conditions weren’t favorable (we were challenged at the time to keep temperature and humidity optimal for the digital textile printer’s preferences), and a host of work-arounds when problems arose as they inevitably did. We failed often enough, but therein lay our successes and discoveries.

Graduate students at work at our first Mimaki digital textile printer, ca. 2002. The machine and the computer to which it was hard wired were the focus of our year-long (and then some) crash course in learning and adapting to these new (to us) technologies.

Once I started to feel confident with the technology’s potentials the work flowed. As it developed, I felt I needed a kind of linking element or leitmotif for what I intended as an ongoing series of quilts consolidating imagery from my travels, from the natural and built environments, and from my imagination. I knew that whatever that leitmotif was, it needed to be sharply articulated. Nuance and subtlety wouldn’t serve.

I thought back to the piece of “zebra” stripe, and liked that it was a fabric source. If I could figure out what to do with it, it would be self-referential in the context in which I might apply it. I made a number of photos of different haphazard arrangements of the ikat, and in Photoshop combined them to form a larger field. Aiming for a repeat, I cut, pasted, rubber stamped and healing brushed my way to a seamless zebra stripe repeat file, and eventually, yardage. Over time I would continue to manipulate the motif, working variations with added color, and with transparencies and layering. The motif became something of a visual and textural workhorse, drawing the spotlight whenever it got a chance to step onstage. Ultimately it would make cameo appearances in a dozen or so quilts over as many years.

Momentum, 2003. 52” h x 87” w; digitally-developed & digitally-printed cotton; reactive dyes; machine-pieced & machine-quilted. Photo by Larry Gawel. Private collection. Below, two detail views.

By the time my department acquired its second digital textile printer, the Mimaki DS-1600 (shown above) in 2012, we had a temperature- and humidity-controlled space for it that helped to keep it operational from week to week and month to month. It functioned better the more it was used, so we were motivated to always have something ready to print. I still have a healthy stash of those fabrics in my studio today (image below). In the third cubbyhole down in the leftmost column, you can see my remaining pieces of the zebra stripe prints making up the top half of that particular stack of printed fabrics.

Abstraction No. 5: Crevasse, 2003; 42.25” h x 65.25” w; digitally-developed & digitally-printed cotton; reactive dyes; machine-pieced & machine-quilted; photo by Larry Gawel.

Magic Carpet, 2004; 79” h x 64” w; digitally-developed & digitally-printed cotton; reactive dyes; machine-pieced & machine-quilted; photo by Larry Gawel.

From my student days abstraction appealed to me because its ambiguity, the indeterminacy of its meanings, and its resistance to any kind of literal interpretation, went counter to how I’d been raised to see the world. In that formative environment of childhood and youth, there was good or evil. Things were black or white. There was heaven and earth and no allowance for any kind of liminal interstice. There was Belief and no other option. You believed or you were damned. By the time I came to quilts I had worked my spiritual way past those kinds of strictures.

Geometric quilts were an emotional and aesthetic fit for me because, even within clear linear structures and employing obvious orders, they could seem – that is, the best of them, the most maverick among them – deliriously irreverent, confoundingly cerebral, or magnetically seductive. Over time many technical and design conventions were adopted by generations of quilt makers, but there were enough makers driven by one-of-a-kind creative impulses that genuine artistry expressed itself frequently enough to offer us inspiring models. It was these, like the two shown below, that kindled my long-lasting enthusiasm.

Left, Double Wedding Ring, ca. 1970. Maker unidentified; hand-pieced & hand-quilted; Robert & Helen Cargo Collection at the International Quilt Museum. Right: Rising Sun, ca. 1890; hand-pieced & hand-quilted; Joanna S. Rose Collection, NYC.

The zebra stripe ikat had within it the kind of freshness and brashness I always found inspiring. It would strike discordant notes in the organic abstractions that were incubating in the collection of prints I was in the process of developing at that moment. Each of us holds within us emotional currents and undercurrents that modulate how we see and feel about the worlds we occupy, and I was working to describe these hidden mind- and soul-scapes.

Left: Daybook: 4 September 2006, 2006; digitally-developed & digitally-printed cotton; reactive dyes; machine-pieced & machine-quilted; private collection. Right: Daybook: 29 September 2006, 2006; digitally-developed & digitally-printed cotton; reactive dyes; machine-pieced & machine-quilted; private collection. Photos by Larry Gawel.

Our existential condition also figured into what I was trying to wrap my visual thinking around, when I set out to configure and re-configure ostensibly disconnected pattern elements. Life is like this. At any moment we are thinking multiple thoughts, navigating overlapping and interwoven psychic as well and physical spaces, and keeping ourselves moving forward in time despite its unknown potential and duration. I’ve often said, our human situation is not very different from that of the mosquito we slap flat on an arm or tabletop. Here one second, gone the next. My trying to make sense of our ephemerality jump-started these visual explorations and scaffolded their development across these last two decades. There may have been thematic and organizational sub-groups, series that represented distinct investigations, but at their core they were all about my trying to parse out these states of being into which I dose off each night and wake each morning.

Land’s End: Quiet Hour, 2014; digitally-developed & digitally-printed cotton; reactive dyes; machine-pieced & machine-quilted; private collection. Photo by Larry Gawel.

“We may know that we are going to die, but the role of art is to make us feel what that means and thereby intensify the commitment to our life.”

– Martin Hägglund, in This Life – Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom (New York, Pantheon Books, ©2019), p. 107.