Mother and Child Art

Spring is an art quilt i made as part of a set. I decided to feature Spring as a heavily pregnant woman to represent how Spring is a time of great creation, with flowers ready to blossom.

Spring's hair is whipping up into a tidal wave of flowers and green leaves as she banishes Winter.

I "borrowed" the woman from Gustav Klimt's painting "Die Hoffnung 2" which you can see below.

After I made art quilts for Autumn and Spring I decided I needed to finish the sequence and make Summer and Winter too.

As Spring was heavily pregnant, I decided to depict Summer holding her baby. I suppose this is symbolic of all the fruits of Summer that were just budding in Spring.

I'm in the process of reworking the idea behind this quilt. You can find out more below.

This is the template I drew out for my new Summer art quilt piece.

I decided I really wasn't happy with the baby in the original quilt so I reworked the child, borrowing the pose from another of Klimt's paintings (the Three Ages of Woman).

I'm still working on this piece. Follow the link below to see how this piece is progressing.

This piece currently hangs on my bedroom wall. She's one of my absolute favourites.

This piece is approximately 24" x 32".

She started off as a simple layered textiles piece and then I started to add fluffy yarns and fabrics on top of her and the child to bring them out of the background.

Mother and Child features in my e-book "Foundling"- a sketchbook based on the idea of foundling babies. At the time of working on the project I was saddened by some stories of abandoned babies and I wanted to make some textiles pieces that focused on parents and children and family rather than the sad stories.

My project went a little too cutesy with bluebirds and babies and nests- but then that's me- a little too twee and a lot whimsical! I'd like to explore the theme more seriously one day. I got an e-mail from someone who'd worked on a similar project where they focused on the objects that foundling children were found with- blankets and clothing and little clues to where they came from. I find this idea of objects linking us to our past very interesting.

This mother and child were inspired quite a bit by Michelle Pfeiffer's Titania in "A Midsummer Night's Dream".

This was another textiles piece from my Foundling project. I couldn't bear the thought of children being left in some of the awful places they were left and instead wanted to make a series of textiles featuring soft gentle nests and gardens. This piece was the first in the series, then came the mother and child piece mentioned above, with the child being found. I also made a father and child piece.

This whimsical piece features bluebirds and a baby and covers the lid of an ottoman I saved from a skip.

The textiles piece is padded so that the baby is almost 3D.

This piece is a follow-on piece from the one shown above.

You'll see the other piece that goes with this one below.

I really wanted to design a Madonna and child piece and this is what I came up with.

As you can see it's similar (but simpler) than some of my pieces above. I've used the same colours and added lots of "fluffy" stuff on top of the piece.

I love Susan Lordi's Willowtree figurines- the way they are fairly simple. This was my attempt to make a textiles piece in the style of Susan Lordi.

In this piece I experimented with using strips of organza to create areas of light and shade.

I decided that I should probably make myself a bag seeing as I made them all the time.I believe I made this bag in 2005 and it's still going strong. I recycled the zips from an old pair of trousers.

This bag features a heavily pregnant Goddess character. I wasn't into sewing faces at this point.

I love the idea of the muse being a character pregnant with ideas and creativity. Although someone told me the woman on my bag looked like she was collapsing under the pressure rather than being a woman pregnant with amazing ideas and inspiration. I've heard of artists and writers referring to their creations as their "babies" so perhaps my choice of topic for my textiles isn't so strange after all.

This giant art doll was inspired by the Empress card in the Major Arcana of the Tarot deck.

The Empress is the essence of motherhood. She's pregnant and two of her children are peeking out from the flowers at the bottom of her skirt.

Can you see them?