MARGARET COOTER

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The Other Side of the River

The bark cloth that sparked this piece comes from the Congo, a troubled part of the world with a history of colonialism and civil war. The irregular ‘geography’ of pale cotton fabrics is machine quilted onto a dark wool cloth; the dark-coloured hand-stitched marks might be seen as the evolution of historical forces acting on and in that landscape – bisected by the boundary of the river. Another view is to look on the river as a highway used by disparate tribes, providing commerce and interaction between distant, divided areas. While stitching, there’s time to contemplate such issues. It’s much more pleasant to think about the area’s traditional tribal societies and their artistic output than about poverty, chaos and the horrible lives of boy soldiers.

 

Natural and synthetic fabrics and threads. Machine quilting with hand-stitch embellishment.

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