LINDISFARNE REVISITED
Pauline Burbidge
Allanbank Mill, Allanton, Scotland
2011
Materials: Cotton fabrics, silk fabrics, machine threads, hand stitch threads, acrylic paint, sand, wadding. (Water, soap, electric power, camera, computer, printer.)
Techniques: Rouching, colour dipping, tinting, pleating, sand painting, painting, collage, stitch, laundering, ironing, fixing, layers of stitch, machine stitch, hand stitch.
79 x 77 inches (202 x 198cm)

LINDISFARNE REVISITED is one of four major new studio quilts by Pauline Burbidge that the poet Alice Mitchell has dubbed "Quiltscapes."

Before Mists Lift
for Pauline Burbidge

Morning gauze ruffled and ruched
sewn to the fabric of sturdy earth,
a run of white stitches like rain
then the dark, waxed thread
and dyed cloth, a drenching does.

At the margin hedgerow and verge
pleats and folds into ditch and dip,
arch and swoop of grass and vetch
makes crisp criss-cross order -
pieces together a raised-work border.

A steel needle flies in and out
unseen, seams and hems landscape
so quiltscape is landscape sewn.

—Alice Mitchell

Pauline explains that this Quiltscape was inspired by the tidal Holy Island, Lindisfarne, "to me a place where sky touches the earth. Holy Island is formed each day, when the causeway is submerged into the sea. A magical place; tides drift in, rearrange and reshuffle and form new beginnings; breathes new life into old. A sense of now is in the air; restoring balance, equilibrium and peacefulness. For me it portrays a sense of the importance of oneself together with the insignificance of oneself; the hugeness of the world combined with the minuteness of a grain of sand. A place that is full of layers of time, past and present, and looking forward into the future; the place has a glorious spiritual atmosphere. I tried to capture some of that feeling in these two works [LINDISFARNE REVISITED and CAUSEWAY III]."

Lindisfarne is the site of the ruins of a twelfth century priory and a dramatically situated sixteenth century castle. The legendary Lindisfarne Gospels, one of most highly decorated and best preserved of all illuminated insular (Celtic Christian) manuscripts, was created at an earlier monastery on the island c. 7oo CE and is now preserved in the British Library in London.

Pauline Burbidge in her studio with her quilt LINDISFARNE REVISITED. (Photo by Brendan Kenny.)

SOLD

View other quilts by Pauline Burbidge

C


Pauline Burbidge hand stitching LINDISFARNE REVISITED. Details below. (Photo by Brendan Kenny.)

All quilt photos are by Luke Watson.