Re-visiting Previous Work

I was going to add some more photos from Iran ( lots more still to share) but then I went off track when reading Olga's blog and got to thinking about how ideas for pieces of work can seem suddenly relevant after a few years laid to rest. Perhaps some have a greater gestation period than others or need to be put aside for a while. The paintings of Atsuhide Ito that Olga highlighted really resonated for me with some ideas and sample pieces I made in 2004. I hadn't had my digital camera that long and coming home from the Festival of Quilts I snapped out of the train window and really liked the blurred landscapes and the reflections off the carriage windows. I experimented with printing double images on cotton and overlaying with silk organza for that months Journal quilt

I then did some printing of some simpler images onto silk and applied them to some old wool blanket and joined the whole lot together with twin needle stitching. There were 6 sections in total and I was planning how I might extend this idea, making an even longer work. One of the problems was that long narrow pieces are difficult to photograph and display ( as for fitting them into a quilt category........) so I didn't take it further at the time.

Train Sequence 2

Train sequence 4


Train sequence 6

I still continued to take pictures from trains including a trip to Japan - I loved the familiarity of the images ( tracks, pylons , stations, etc) but also the differences -, the scale of landscape, the colours (bright green rice fields) and shapes of buildings. I have a whole folder called (imaginatively! )Japan Train - some images below.

So why haven't I worked since on blurred train images? I think that might go back to 7/7 2005 when I was on the last train from Kings Cross seconds before the bombs went off. I was at a meeting in Peterborough and thought I would be stranded there with no information about what had happened to friends and family. In the end I got home very late thanks to someone giving me a lift well out of his way and coming into Ealing from Reading on the train. My July Journal quilt was based on that experience and I did think of using photos I'd taken previously on that route and calling it 'the Journey home' but it felt wrong - it was too obvious , too personal and quilts with meaning spelt out are not my style.

But I'm excited now about re-visiting the idea of a 'train' quilt , especially with the Japanese images. Just don't read anything into it........