Saturday, January 16, 2016

DNA & Music

DNA & Music (18 1/2" tall X 12 3/4" wide - approx. 26 wefts/inch)

I've been interested in integrating more traditional designs into my weavings to juxtapose alongside my more contemporary ones. For this piece, I settled on the 3rd Phase Chief Blanket design. I just really like the move from blue, black, and white stripes (1st phase) into the merging of stripes with a broken border of step diagonals (2nd and 3rd phases).

I also was aiming to move away from my "very bright" color palette and wanted to step out of my box and try out more natural grays, greens, and browns. So, for the 3rd Phase Chief Blanket portion of my design (background), I stuck to those colors as much as possible and only allowed myself the smallest amount of blue for the music notes and for the "sparkles" at the ends of the arms of the crosses because this blue is so gorgeous, who could resist? Not me.

The main part of my design, you might recognize as the DNA double helix. The colors that make up the two spirals of phosphate backbone are the colors of the rainbow and the same colors used to represent the LGBTQ community. For the DNA strands, I used audio tape. Feel free to visit the blog post prior to this one for more insight into the music and artist(s) recorded on the tape and the reason for the incorporation of audio tape as weft.

I am very proud of the way this weaving came out, both visually and technically. This project felt "complete" when I sent it away to its new home, which is not something that happens with every piece. In my experience, there are always those tweaks that you wish you could make to a finished piece. Not with this one... It may be because some creations create themselves.