Inspiration

Something about travel opens my mind to creative impulses, maybe because I’m away from normal responsibilities and not preoccupied with trivia such as laundry and grocery lists. At any rate, during our trip to Tucson I had the urge to create more wall hangings interpreting in fabric what I had seen there.

Before we traveled to Delft in The Netherlands several years ago I had never made a wall hanging. In Delft I was so struck by the street designs that I came home and started sewing my versions of what I had seen. For example, here are two of the two pieces I made, the one on the left a fragment of sidewalk and on the right the courtyard in front of the University of Delft library.

Visiting the Tucson Museum of Art I was similarly inspired by the exhibit “Rose Cabat at 100: A Retrospective Exhibition of Ceramics.” Inspiration came not only from the shapes and colors of the ceramic pieces but also from the way they were displayed.

Suddenly I could see in my mind a wall hanging of white silk with a little grey silk and small appliqués of vase shapes in all those gorgeous colors. Right away I began to think about how to go about making it.

It happened again on the flight from Tucson to Dallas. The geometric patterns of irrigated fields in west Texas as seen from the sky inspired me to interpret them in fabric.

Constructing a wall hanging based on this scene would be challenging. How would I create all those circles? Appliqué, certainly, but what kind of fabric? These questions entertained me all the way to Dallas.

These ideas probably will never become reality, but the inspirations lift my spirit. My wrecked hands probably couldn’t do the detailed work required, but I can dream about doing it, and that is almost as good.

Copyright 2014 by Shirley Domer