The Distant Peregrine Quilt
Cat Frampton
2023
During the first Covid lockdown, when we all assumed art would flow easily while most were isolated and given time to create, I came up with the idea of a art project that linked farmers and birds.
I asked the Pasture For Life forum if anyone on there had a favourite bird that had started them on the path of helping nature on their land. The response was instant and a bit overwhelming. PFL members emailed the forum with their love for a particular bird, saying how helping that bird was important to them, how seeing that bird bought them joy.
I was reading ‘The Soil Never Sleeps’ by Adam Horovitz at the time, a collection of poems based on visits to PFL farms, and the words ‘a distant peregrine’ jumped out at me. A fleeting mention of a bird that almost became extinct due to farming practices, that now thrives again, lodged in my brain and became the focal image of the project.
I started pulling the threads together to form a exhibition, but then stalled. Covid lockdown was not a time when my art flowed. Instead I turned to my land and focused on the soil, the birds, the beetles, the cows. Then I faced grief, and art receded a little bit further as the land of my mother became mine.
But, art will raise up its head when it is time. So the idea of birds and farmers crept back into my head and while it did John Meadley from the PFL pushed me in his quiet kind way to pick up the reigns. He introduced me to Alex Cherry and amazingly I was offered the honour of being Artist in Residence at groundswell.
This was the kick start I needed. I had been working on some individual pictures that were based on birds the PFL members had loved, but I needed a bigger piece that pulled the ideas together, so The Distant Peregrine quilt was born.
I wanted to show both how interconnected the birds were and how they fit into a landscape, and also how fragile their existence is. A quilt is both everyday hardwearing and easily damaged, and as it’s made from cotton and linen it will biodegrade eventually, back into the land from which it grew.
The background of the quilt was drawn, using oil pastels, onto 8 large pieces of paper spread across my kitchen floor. The pastels give a fluid line, sweeping across the paper to show coast, hill, pasture, woods and water. I then individually photographed the 8 paper panels and had them digitally printed onto organic cotton so I could stitch them together with old linen and a repurposed bedspread.
Once the landscape was whole again I then stitched the names of the birds onto a blue stripped fabric that made me think of lined paper and notebooks, and pieced them onto the landscape with deliberately loose stitches, easily broken, easily frayed, easily undone.
I quilted the fabric layers together with stronger threads, running a line from the bird to it’s habitat, a solid simple stitched thread, over and under each other, anchoring the fragile birds to the land, showing that their needs are noticed, their habitat important to the PFL members who nominated them.
Those birds are loved by people who can help them.
Cat Frampton
2023
During the first Covid lockdown, when we all assumed art would flow easily while most were isolated and given time to create, I came up with the idea of a art project that linked farmers and birds.
I asked the Pasture For Life forum if anyone on there had a favourite bird that had started them on the path of helping nature on their land. The response was instant and a bit overwhelming. PFL members emailed the forum with their love for a particular bird, saying how helping that bird was important to them, how seeing that bird bought them joy.
I was reading ‘The Soil Never Sleeps’ by Adam Horovitz at the time, a collection of poems based on visits to PFL farms, and the words ‘a distant peregrine’ jumped out at me. A fleeting mention of a bird that almost became extinct due to farming practices, that now thrives again, lodged in my brain and became the focal image of the project.
I started pulling the threads together to form a exhibition, but then stalled. Covid lockdown was not a time when my art flowed. Instead I turned to my land and focused on the soil, the birds, the beetles, the cows. Then I faced grief, and art receded a little bit further as the land of my mother became mine.
But, art will raise up its head when it is time. So the idea of birds and farmers crept back into my head and while it did John Meadley from the PFL pushed me in his quiet kind way to pick up the reigns. He introduced me to Alex Cherry and amazingly I was offered the honour of being Artist in Residence at groundswell.
This was the kick start I needed. I had been working on some individual pictures that were based on birds the PFL members had loved, but I needed a bigger piece that pulled the ideas together, so The Distant Peregrine quilt was born.
I wanted to show both how interconnected the birds were and how they fit into a landscape, and also how fragile their existence is. A quilt is both everyday hardwearing and easily damaged, and as it’s made from cotton and linen it will biodegrade eventually, back into the land from which it grew.
The background of the quilt was drawn, using oil pastels, onto 8 large pieces of paper spread across my kitchen floor. The pastels give a fluid line, sweeping across the paper to show coast, hill, pasture, woods and water. I then individually photographed the 8 paper panels and had them digitally printed onto organic cotton so I could stitch them together with old linen and a repurposed bedspread.
Once the landscape was whole again I then stitched the names of the birds onto a blue stripped fabric that made me think of lined paper and notebooks, and pieced them onto the landscape with deliberately loose stitches, easily broken, easily frayed, easily undone.
I quilted the fabric layers together with stronger threads, running a line from the bird to it’s habitat, a solid simple stitched thread, over and under each other, anchoring the fragile birds to the land, showing that their needs are noticed, their habitat important to the PFL members who nominated them.
Those birds are loved by people who can help them.
