FLYING GOOSE
Katherine Knauer
New York, New York
Begun 1993; completed 2003
Commercially printed fabrics, fabric overprinted by the artist with hand stencil and Print Gocco on used and laundered bed sheets, printed Japanese towels, and mattress ticking (on the back only). Machine pieced with some machine appliqué, hand quilted.
86 x 86 inches

Katherine Knauer comments: "The 'seminal' inspiration for this piece came in 1993, when the topic in the news was Safe Sex and my friend and my friend and fellow quiltmaker Theresa Barkley gave me six yards of hot pink fabric printed with smiley-faced condoms. So— what else could I do? The title refers to the traditional Flying Geese pattern, which is made of vertical columns of triangles. Other visual puns in the quilt include the fact that pink triangles were used by the Nazis to label homosexuals, a stitch called 'strewn rice' was used to quilt the sections of Japanese fabrics, and I used mattress ticking to back the quilt. I also printed sections of laundered bed sheets with condoms and sperm cells to reiterate the theme and combined those fabrics with Japanese printed tenugui hand towels and prints of Sumo wrestlers from Lunn Fabrics.

$8000

Contact Robert Shaw for more information or to purchase

More quilts by Katherine Knauer

Photos by Karen Bell