Screenprint Quilt

This piece came out of a collaboration between three other artists and I, where we played around with screen printing on a big canvas. We were curious about what would happen if we each brought our own style into one large work and just let them overlap and mix. We divided the canvas into four quadrants, almost like a quilt, and spread our designs across them. The process felt a lot like a quilting circle—everyone working together, keeping their own voice, but also building something new as a group. The end result really captures that feeling of true collaboration.

The Process

The featured image above is of only one of the four editions of this print. Each print is of the same size, color and arrangement. To start, because each canvas was so large (50 × 50”), we broke it down into smaller sections and limited the printed area to 40 × 40” to make it easier to work with the silkscreens. Each screen covered a 10 × 20” section, and for every layer of color we burned the image onto a screen and pulled ink through it. Altogether, we ended up running ink through 8 screens for each edition.

We decided on a CMY color scheme. We started with blue (cyan).

Then came magenta, and finally yellow. Each edition works as its own “quilt” print, but once we finished them all, we laid them out together to form an even bigger version—so big we barely had enough space to document it.