Art & Cold Cash - Collaborative Art Quilt Project

I'm working on a collaborative art quilt project with friend and artist Jack Butler and another quilter friend Bernice. Jack spent several years living up in northern Canada (Baker Lake, Nunavut: located 320 km (200 mi) inland from Hudson Bay) with the Inuit working on a critical exploration of the introduction of capitalism into Northern economies. "Art and Cold Cash" explores how capitalism was introduced to Inuit culture through the development of indigenous arts and crafts industries.

During this project Jack explored his own introduction to money with a work titled "My First Memory of Money is Selling Flower Seeds Door to Door". This piece is a story of his grandfather showing him how to package 4 o'clock seeds in envelopes and then going door to door selling them to the neighbourhood mothers.

Jack's original work was digitally scanned and the image was sent to Spoonflower to be printed onto cotton fabric. The size of the printed image is approx. 30" by 40".

This cloth version will be quilted and embellished with thread painting, beads yarn and ribbon. There will be a small inner border of red fabric about 1/4" and the outer border will be a cream raw silk which will also contain some additional embellishments. We are still planning out the details of the treatment.

In addition there was a digitally manipulated version of the image that was also printed onto cotton fabric in the same dimensions. This image has a "northern lights" kind of feel to it and will also be quilted and embellished. It will also have a 1/4" inner border of red fabric and the outer border is a dark blue and black mottled cotton.

This will be an on going project for many months given it's collaborative nature and I will keep you posted on its progress. We have yet to decide which of the two we are going to start first.