improv – Chris Mercerhill.com

Rainbow #1

Posted on December 20, 2018 by admin

rainbow 1

10″ x 7.5″
2018
Sold

This mini improv photoquilt was created for the silent auction at the Ecole Kenwood art show and sale where it was snapped up in a last-minute frenzy of bidding.

The rainbow is made from some of my favorite pieces to work with: photos of the colorful hoods, roofs, and trunks of hot rods and the white strips of photo paper that are cut from between photos when they are printed. For this photoquilt, I started with a rainbow of seven colors and then gradually added the strips until I was happy with the balance and the spacing. My original plan was to line the colors all up in parallel, but every time I laid them on my sewing table they all slid a little to one side or another and I found that I liked that arrangement better than the rigidity of the parallel structure, so I incorporated it into the final piece.

Because this piece was so popular at the auction, I’m currently working on more, one of which will be sold to the second highest bidder and those proceeds will also be donated to the school.

Fade to Red

Posted on December 20, 2018 by admin

15″ x 21″
2018
$250

This improvisational photoquilt combines a few pieces and parts that I’ve used before: the metallic red rectangles from Red Turn and the thin, mostly white strips that are leftover after photos are printed. I previously used these strips in Persistence of Winter.

My focus with this photoquilt was balancing the red and the white. The result is a bit like a photo that’s been zoomed in a thousand times so that each pixel, which had formed a perfect curve, begins to break down and dissolve. The shapes have some order without seeming patterned, almost like residential plots in a sprawling suburban neighborhood.

detail

Red Turn

Posted on December 20, 2018 by admin

20″ x 22″
2018
$200

This photoquilt is a further exploration of improvisational quilting. Here, I’ve taken a series of red photographs all from the hoods, roofs, and trunks of hot rods at various car shows, and cut them into squares and rectangles and further into circles.

The metallic shine of the paint creates surprising depth and the circles seem to start to make a pattern within the squares without ever completely resolving themselves. This represents a fairly radical departure from traditional quilt patterns, which I find to be very compelling.

Persistence of Winter

Posted on December 20, 2018 by admin

31″ x 31″
2018
$200

This is one of my first forays into improvisational quilting. Instead of choosing a pattern and then cutting and sewing several blocks in that pattern, I took several photo prints and began cutting and sewing to see what I could come up with. This photoquilt combines a stack of photos of a lovely yellow forsythia bush with several white strips of photo paper that are the remnants of the photo printing process — the strips are cut from between the prints to render them into their final size.

I was working with these prints in the springtime, which is probably what got me thinking about snow. As I began cutting the prints and filling the cuts with strips, I thought about the snow that remains a constant threat to return throughout the spring but also the snow that recedes to reveal beautiful flowers like the ones on this forsythia bush. And so, across the quilt, the snow gets heavy at times, and melts away at others, revealing the flowers beneath and between.

detail