The work of Ashley Thayer. I love how her work naturally crosses back and forth from quilts to paintings. I can’t wait to see them in person.
The chemistry of salt water, our own pH, the suction of a wave: the antihierarchy that nature presents is addressed by human perception through our endless, often abstract, narratives. By orchestrating the emotion of painterly color and the rationality within the geometry of quilts, Ashley Thayer creates striking visual abstractions to materialize such narratives. Thayer practices low immersion, vat dyeing, shibori, and various resist techniques used in Africa and India, allowing water to carry and resist marks on fiber. “My work with dyes and quilting has come directly out of my painting process. Everything I am doing with fabrics I did in paper or wood first. Creating color with dye allows me to be much more deliberate and thoughtful because of the physicality of it and the steps involved in the mixing process… . Dyeing is an indirect application of pigment to the surface. It is a precise science but there will always be something uncontrollable about it, something unexpected due to all of the variables.” For these processes Thayer uses reactive MX dyes, acid dyes, indigo, and natural dyes from botanicals foraged around her home in Los Angeles; some of which include tea leaves, rust, seaweed, mangos, beetroot, black eyed susan and eucalyptus bark.
The word aequum is the Latin adjective for impartial, equal, even, calm or fair. Aside from the general attributes of the term, aequum also references how each series of work uses equal increments of measurement. In many of Thayer’s quilts, triangles of equal size are used like building blocks to create the larger patterns that seem to multiply infinitely within the work. For Thayer shape and form are expressed in measurement through the use of math, geometry and drafting in her creative process.
”There is no physical ‘pattern’ that I use to trace a quilt off of. I am drawing a graph and deconstructing it. I think about the math of composing music. I am visualizing a song. I love that certain relationships come into play again and again, some measurements seem unlikely but they work. Knowing that hundreds of years ago quilters were adept at this geometry makes the application of numbers seem human, shared, and a comfort.”
If you are in the San Francisco area, Ashley’s work will be up at Tartine through January.
**All images are from Ashley Thayer’s website. The italicized text is from the Tartine blog.
