Clio Padovani:- Quilting Point: 2009

Piecing: appliqué: layering fragment over fragment, obscuring and filling the existing ground, producing a covering or structuring it with pattern.

I was drawn to explore how to reference quilting techniques with fragments of moving images, how to structure and organise a textile media narrative.

Just like the scraps of fabric traditionally used to make a quilt possess an intimacy born of everyday personal and family use, I wanted the video clips to have the feel of public and private – to reflect images we might see everyday, with our eyes, or in our mind.

The quilting bee: communal work project: the shaped movie clips pulse and breathe on the screen, enlarging, contracting, constructing a collective dialogue: the blocks of images change and transform into patterns organised by the framework of personal experience. The story of the fabrics becomes individualised, structured by the pattern.

The voice is the thread: it connects and constructs, it pieces together this sequence or story, this kind of cloth.

The voice- thread binds together imagination and the pictures on the screen.

The quilting point: in Lacanian thought, it is where signifier and signified are knotted together. The needle passes through the layers of cloth/text /dialogue and brings them together. The moment of stillness in the quilted pattern, between its construction and deconstruction, enables a little recognition and clarity.

The movement of signification is stopped, and produces the necessary illusion of a fixed meaning.

“When there are not enough quilting points, then the movement of signification is endless, and stable meanings dissolve altogether.”

June 09