The problem was
that by creating the frame first, I had inadvertently given myself serious design challenges – unseen in
advance, like putting the horse before the cart. I had never worked this way
before, usually working from the centre out, or at least having a background to
work on. The frame always came last.
And it presented me with quite a conundrum. So I started working on the
symbols that would fill the space. I’d already drawn up designs for the Celtic
knot and Ionian dove, (though had to play with the latter in order to come to a
pleasing design - I didn’t want a “twitter” bird, and the earlier one I’d
chosen seemed to give this impression). I knew that they could float on top of
the background, placed in the either corner at the top. But first the roses,
the moon, and the ancient Dove Goddess image I had chosen to include needed a
firm and clear position in the whole, requiring a choice of colour for the
background. Looking around at where the blooms were showing in the natural
world, with the stunning Jacarandas in full bloom, by serendipity, I had a
piece of hand-dyed fabric just that colour in my stash, which was just enough
fabric to fill the frame - if I was careful.
I was keen to
place the many individual roses, cut out months before and still arranged
around the candle on my coffee table, into position within the frame. I often
lit this candle, looking for inspiration on how these many roses might be
positioned on the quilt. Many people liked them on my coffee table, but I knew
they were destined for Rob’s quilt! I needed to give another dimension to the stark rectangular frame with
its as yet blank purple canvas, and dividing up the space with the roses seemed
like a pleasurable thing to do. Trouble was, how to arrange them? In a circle?
In a ’bunch’? In each corner? One morning I went back to bed with my cup of
tea, and as I stepped on the little Afghan carpet beside the bed I noticed the
elongated square, a square pulled into a lozenge or diamond shape, and overall
design for the holding space of the background fell into place, leaving the
four corners for the symbols hovering to find their place on the quilt. Strange
where inspiration comes from! Another serendipity came from reading a story
about a woman who saw her inner self as a rose (Rachel Remen, Kitchen table
wisdom). Forming a perhaps rather angular and stylised mandorla shape, this was
the first representation of the vesica piscis symbol, which continued to become
manifest in other places as the creative process progressed.
The vesica
piscis in the Celtic knot
The first symbol to come into form, and waiting to
be placed, was the Celtic knot. Robyn had visited the Findhorn Foundation on the island of Iona to do a week-long spiritual retreat, called "Birth of
the Undivided Self. During her time there she had felt the place itself had
given her a sense of the veil between the worlds being thin, connections with
the other world tangible, especially in the case of her grandmother’s presence,
who had visited Iona when Rob was 10 years old. While the interlaced triangle
is linked to this visit by her Grandmother to Iona, who brought back a souvenir
of a silver serviette ring with a Celtic knot engraved on it, the image has no
doubt great significance in Rob’s own personal spiritual journey.
On the quilt,
the symbol of the Celtic knot (or ‘triquetra’) is composed of three overlapping
vesica pisces, which I have coloured white, red and black to signify the triple
Goddess and three stages of a woman’s life: maiden, mother and crone. Unlike
most images I’ve seen of this knot, however, I have positioned the ‘triquetra’
with the base at the top, and the red vesica of motherhood pointing downwards
(rather than the more usual upward pointing orientation) because I feel this
gives emphasis to the power of womanhood in bringing forth and nurturing life.
It is placed inside an inverted triangle, traditionally representing the
fertile pubic triangle.
Interlacing in
design is, of course, so beautifully executed in the Book of Kells, and these
designs also embody story, with perhaps some evidence for an overlap between
indigenous understandings entwined with the imported stories of the Christian
Gospels. In the art of story telling, interlacing was a common way of
communicating traditional tales and familial connections, in the sense that the
audience at a telling could make connections without the need for specific or
detailed explanation. These days of digital communications we might say they
could pick up on the thread. The interpretation of course relies on
familiarity with the story and characters involved, especially in reference to
binary complementarities, such as war and peace, love and hate, life and death.
Further to this, the interlacing in stories was about endless games containing
riddles, hidden omens concealed in the story telling…the more such inferences, the more
entertaining, erudite and educational, it was. But, perhaps most importantly
for our forebears, ‘it (interlacing) attempts to symbolize the
intricate patterns of destiny which none can avoid.’[1]
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