10~12.06.2018 [Quilt Festival in Korea] / aT Center, Seoul.KR
09~12.08.2018 [the Festival of Quilts] / NEC, Birmingham.UK
11~14.04.2019 [Australiasian Quilt Convention] / Royal Exhibition Building, Melbourne.AU
12 quilters, 12 duos of art bags with quilts
Have you ever left your bag behind? Contacting lost & found center for the bag, you may have to describe what the bag looks like, as well as what is inside. That is how to identify yourself as the bag owner.
The purpose of a bag is to conceal something while the bag itself is always exposed to strangers. Even in case you show off your new bag or ask someone to keep their eyes on the bag, it does not necessarily give them permission to look at the contents inside. You may have been embarrassed when the contents of the bag revealed every nook and cranny on the screen at the security check.
The contents of the bag are usually hidden, but you can take something out any time you want. You never put in your bag what you don't want to share with others in any circumstances. The decision of what to reveal and what to conceal is up to you.
It can also happen as an essential issue in every art, including the quilt. When a quilt is exhibited, especially in a quilt show, it can be shown in both way, the audience sees the revealed surface to read the concealed story. They look into the quilt itself, seeing details like colours, stitches, materials a quilter choose and techniques put on the quilt, imagining how long it would take to make, and what the quilt tell about the quilter. It could be something the quilter wants to share with the audience, while they sometimes miss what she or he wants to express through it, then suddenly pull out something never imagined to be noticed.
Under the long history of sacrifice and humility considered as granted for women, a form could be a matter of expression of their being, beyond the universal identity. And traditionally quilt has been on both sides, art and craft, hobby and profession. Quilters are both customers and suppliers. How it is made turns into what it is, as the quilt is both technique and subject at the same time. But whichever quilters are focused on, the fact has not changed that they made quilts for their own expression and others' appreciation, under their own philosophical judgement of aesthetic value.
When a quilter makes a quilt bag and a quilt as a pair, representing a form and the contents, the exhibition would be quite experimental as the border between bag and quilt, function and expression, or form and the contents become ambiguous. Again, what does your bag look like and what do you have in it? What is concealed then revealed?
12 talented quilters present pairs of a quilt bag and a wall quilt, with their own interpretation of the subject "reveal or conceal".
