I have made good progress on my pattern work and have arrived at a place where the concept and the aesthetic are now where I want them to be. The idea of the ‘dissonant’ and ‘rhyming’ pattern still holds but having used an hexagonal template (traditional, of course, with blanket design) the overall image now has much more aesthetic appeal. And, of course, being a traditional design (the hexagon), it fits very well with the overall concept; history, fragments, tokens and, for want of a better phrase, world building; the idea that when we think of the past, we are building the world within our imaginations.
For my own benefit, I’m going to recap on the work so far.
First of all there were the ‘Dissonance and Rhyme’ images; two similar but contrasting patterns (see previous post).
I wanted the designs to have a pastoral aspect and so I took the lines above and imagined them as branches, appending leaves.
Again, I like these designs very much and will continue to use and explore them further.
Working on my family tree, I wanted to create something which explored the fact that we, as individuals, comprise fragments of our ancestors’ DNA. I love the fact that I can look on Ancestry and discover someone I am very distantly related to (owing to the fact that we share a very small amount of DNA) and that by comparing our family trees, find the place where our trees converged, sometimes from an ancestor alive in the mid 18th century.
One can imagine a blanket, stitched in the past being handed down through the generations; one which, might be patched up over time with new patterns. Taking this idea, I thought of how I am made up of lots of different patterns, some more extensive than others and decided to use the hexagonal template design to show this, where, using my mother’s maternal line, my grandmother would be so many patches, my great-grandmother so many less (about half) and so on, stretching back to the 18th century.
I began with a square design first.
I love the fractured, fragmentary quality of these; that and the fact they are nonetheless complete pieces with an overall, homogeneous look.
Taking these further, I extended the images to have the same ratio as a blanket.
It didn’t take much to then adapt these to fit with the scrolls I’ve designed previously.
