Technology dominates life today. We modern humans think this is all brand new; before the computer and cell phone, we like to believe technology wasn’t a thing.
I say, that’s not actually true. To our distant Ancestors, the button was a piece of high technology. In Tech Evolution, I’m exploring the idea of how technological growth has been with us all along. With each passing shift in technology, the stuff that was once novel becomes common place. Although the overall feel is of paintings on a cave wall made in our distant past, I’ve included images of buttons almost as if they’re a kind of science fiction of the day.
What would early homo sapiens have thought if they’d been introduced to such evolutionary technology?
- Materials: Hand-dyed cotton, cotton-polyester thread.
- Series: Transitions
- Size: 20 inches x 40 inches (50 cm x 100 cm)
- Completed: 2022
- Current location: Private Collection
- History: New Zone Art Collective, Zone 4 All exhibit, October 2022
My Thoughts on the Work
This piece is a part of the Transitions series. I designed it in part for practice on my new long arm quilting machine. Each piece in the series offered me a new technological challenge and skill-building opportunity. This one challenged me to learn how to plan my quilting path such that I didn’t have more starting and stopping points than necessary – I don’t love tying off threads. I enjoyed using the long arm to stitch the background in particular. I was aiming to enhance the patterns I’d achieved in the hand-dyed fabric I used for the background. I loved how those patterns mimicked the patterns I find in many forms of Jasper and other minerals. It was easy to imagine them in a cave wall where our Ancestors might have made their marks.
