Design is a multi-sensory experience and the African American Quilts Show at the Richard L. Nelson museum at UC Davis lets us enjoy both the visual (optic) and tactile (haptic) nature of these beautifully hand-made quilts. The binaries, haptic and optic, make a design or artwork more relatable because we as humans need to look and touch objects in order to understand them. Part of the need to touch an object is to know what it feels like so we can not only comprehend it but also connect it to similar objects, emotions, situations, times, moods, tastes, experiences etc. So often an artist or designer uses this principle in their piece to evoke a connection in the audience to any of the examples listed above. However, this phenomenon doesn’t necessarily have to be achieved through the explicit act of touching an artwork or an object; it can be achieved through an implied feel of an object: texture. In Untitled 77”X 76” a cotton quilt in the show the artist, an African American slave, uses the texture of the quilt to transport us to a place and time, the Marymount Plantation near Lewisburg, Tennessee during slavery (pictured above).
Texture according to David A. Lauer is when a surface arouses our sense of touch. And touch can tells us a lot about a place or time. The repeated stitches around the flower-like shapes in Untitled create a bumpy texture and it is almost as each one is a trail through which you can trace the artist around the maze of the plantation field. Further depicted is a crop or something that grows on the plantation that inspired the quilted to incorporate it very stylistically into the quilt. This idea is bolstered by the repetition of the flower-like shapes in alternating colors suggesting a grouping which could easily be cotton or any other crop picked by the artist. Furthermore, the texture on these “crops” is distinct of that of the maze; it has a cross-hatching which makes the surface feel like it’s rough or coarse.
These observations of texture might seem shallow, but they are necessary to understand how cleverly the artist was able use the rough texture of the structured shape and only in the structured shape to connect us to the feeling of the rough an often very restricted life slaves led while working and picking crops, with the smooth and flowing texture of the plantation in the background where slaves had the most freedom to roam; the plantation becomes a space that was their own, even if they didn’t own the place!
So, when I began this blog with the statement that the African American Quilts show lets us enjoy the visual and tactile quality of the quilts, I meant that the textures of quilts evoked our sense of touch not that we could actually touch the quilts because I’m pretty sure that touching these antiques was prohibited!
Credits:
Design Basics 7th edition by Lauer and Pentak
Photo taken at the Richard. L. Nelson Gallery & Fine Arts collect in the Art Department at UC Davis
No comments:
Post a Comment