Indigo: four striking hand quilts at Connolly Gallery in Mayfair

10 May

Allen les Bleus! Part II: three new hand quilt designs, Quad, Penta and Perpendot, are on display for London Craft Week in the gallery at Connolly in Mayfair. The designs integrate fabric remnants from Connolly’s S/S24 collection with blue and natural linens.

Quad takes inspiration from 1960s relief artworks, in particular the work of the British artist Victor Passmore. The design is a rhythmic arrangement of rectangles which uses occlusion and colour variegation to muddle figure and ground; densely quilted in quadratic spirals.

Penta was prompted by my stumbling upon a photo of the lobby floor tiles devised by Marjorie Rice at the Mathematical Association of America a few years ago while researching a talk on pattern for a group of year 11 school students. While I was vaguely aware that you cannot tesselate (that is, join together without gaps or overlaps) a regular pentagon, this discovery introduced me to the tessellation of irregular pentagons. My design is number 3 of the 15 irregular pentagons known to tesselate. No mystery how – three of them form the hexagon that we recognise from traditional patchwork – but I love how the pattern is veiled by a baroque appearance of asymmetry. This one is quilted in a loose pentagonal latticework.

The third design, Perpendot, is an enlarged detail from an improvised quilt from about five years ago, with sections re-improvised in the Connolly indigo stuffs. It is quilted to echo the circle, square and triangle – elemental units gone awry – of which the design is composed.

Fissure (2019) is also on display – a big ‘crazy’ quilt improvised in a variety of blues including cotton, linen, silk and velvet.

The exhibition Indigo is open from 10–18 May in the first floor gallery at Connolly, 4 Clifford Street, London W1. The quilts are for sale by Connolly.