FAMOUS QUILT EXHIBITION PART II: NORIKO NOZAWA

Noriko Nozawa is a Japanese quilter.  Wow!  Her quilts are amazing and inspirational.  I spent a lot of time looking at these.  I think just about all her quilts on show had been in Houston or in the Yokohama show in Japan.  It was easy to see why they were in the shows.  Sadly, there was no information available about her in English.

This quilt is titled,  METRO, Where Do You Go From Now On?

This is a wonderful quilt.  Like most of her other quilts on display, it has so much hidden away.  Each time Iris and I went back to look at it, we saw something else.

Luckily I had Iris with me, so she soon worked out that the coloured lines were the New York subway, and that the black and brown background, is a map of Manhattan and er, well other places in New York (sorry I forget and don't want to say the wrong ones!).
A close up of the characters shows you that they are very simple in form.  All the figures have words or images appliquéd on them, which we took to be relevant to what they were going to do after they exited the station.  These people had calculations on them, so we decided that they were financiers.

This man is clutching flowers and has an engagement ring on his back.  It is funny as I didn't notice the ring the first time I examined this figure.

We think the woman is off to a day working with fashion, whilst he is either an academic or a 'square'.  Geddit?

This next quilt, Blue Note New York, is my absolute favourite.  I want to own this quilt!  I noticed that Noriko uses a lot of what looked like Moda Marbles for the coloured elements.  The blue in this quilt, is a colour that I really dislike, yet I just love it in this quilt.  It makes the quilt sing like jazz!

Look at how sparsely featured the faces are, but how much they convey.  Noriko is a master with a limited pallet of colours.

The machine quilting doesn't overwhelm the quilts, but adds a lovely texture to them.

These buildings sit into the background.  The third highest building, and the one behind it, are simply dark fabric with a line of satin stitch.  This is so simple but so effective.  It reminds me of water-colour painting and something that I would like to achieve in my work.  Know when less is more.

Since neither of us are jazz fans, we are not sure if the words are titles of jazz songs or jazz lyrics.  Such a stunning quilt.  If I owned a Jazz Club, I'd want this quilt on my club's wall.

Sorry but I lost the name of this quilt.  The wonder of this quilt for both Iris and myself is again the use of a spare pallet.  The background is made of different reds and when you look closely, you realise that there are some musical instruments and notes there.  I really do encourage you to click on the pictures after reading about them, to see them in a larger format.  Then you will see what I mean about the hidden elements in these quilts.

Together With You, is another quilt that I love, there is just so much tucked into it.  Look at how the background is a map of Europe.  You can see Britain tucked down there under the departure board.  Isn't that board great? It lists the departure times from a station that is presumably in France.

Even the map the couple are holding shows Europe on the back.  If you look to the lower left of the map, you can see the boot shape of Italy, clear as anything.  How about that for attention to detail?

I am not a fan of items leaping off the front of a quilt, but I think the tactile nature of his scarf and her blouse, sit well into the overall scheme of this quilt.

It just amazes me how much Noriko has conveyed in this quilt.  On closer inspection, I suddenly realised that some of the quilting lines, are a sort of blanket stitch that looks like a rail line.

Andalucia, is a bit more colourful that the previous quilts.  It isn't quite so obvious in this photo, but the dancers dress does have a sense of sweeping across the floor.

 The musician looked like a really cool dude!

Concertmistree is a lot more colourful and very crowded by comparison to the other quilts and in general I wasn't so taken by this quilt.  Interestingly this is newer that the other quilts.

I never thought I'd see quilts like these in Bangkok, so well done to Janome for bringing them over, even though it was rather sad that they were hidden away in Janome's headquarters.  On the plus side, we were alone for most of the time we were there, so could enjoy ourselves commenting, photographing and attempting to squish a few of the quilts into our bags!