Be ˈKyu̇r-ē-əs! — September

Heather O’Hara, Flight Patterns, 2007, assembled lithographs on paper, 78.25" x 78.25."

An artist finally answers the question: "How long did it take to make?" 

In 2010 Mitchel Latimer was a middle school student at Sidney Gutierrez Middle School. As a class project, students identified a piece of art at AMoCA and wrote questions directly to the artist who made their chosen piece. Mitchel selected Heather O’Hara’s Flight Patterns, and this is her eloquent answer…including how long it took her!

What was your inspiration?

When I came up with the idea for Flight Patterns, I was thinking about all the times I left the home where I grew up in Pennsylvania, only to be drawn back a few months or years later. I wanted to make something that illustrated the double need I felt – both to return home to things familiar and to leave for things unknown. My main motivation for the piece was to show my feelings surrounding deciding to live in Roswell for a year, leaving my family to live in a part of the country I was completely unfamiliar with. I chose images that I felt represented migration between my home on the east coast and my temporary home in Roswell: the flying sandhill crane and the airplane taking off, the view from an airplane of the grid of fields and the wallpaper pattern from my bedroom at home.

Is the title intended as a pun?

I did mean it as a bit of a pun. My father is always telling horrible puns, and I guess I inherited the trait. Also, it seemed to me that the expression “Flight Patterns” is nicely open ended. It could refer not just to planes and birds, but also to the way that humans make their way through life and relationships.

Is there a story behind it?

Even though the quilt is based on my experiences of leaving home, I didn’t want the story to be of any one particular event. I hope instead that the images placed together give a sense of repetition, of travel and movement, and of things close up and far away being closely linked. I hope that people who are interested in the quilt will create their own story or relate it to their own experiences of travelling or leaving home.

How long did it take?

There were two main steps to the process of making the piece. First, I printed the images of the wallpaper and the aerial view onto paper using a printmaking process called lithography. For the wallpaper image, I had to draw the image onto a large stone slab using a special grease crayon. Then after chemically processing the image, I printed each of the three colors one at a time onto the paper. For the aerial view, I used acid to draw and erase the image in layers from another stone slab, printing onto paper after each change, a total of eight times. Altogether, the drawing and printing took about three weeks, working all day, every day.

After printing was done and the prints were dry, I cut out the silhouettes and sewed everything together. This was much quicker, only taking a few days to do. Lastly, though, I decided that the paper quilt was not sturdy enough on its own and that it needed a supporting frame so that it could hang in the Anderson Museum. This turned out to be the most difficult step of all, and I ended up spending a whole week working out how to properly attach the paper to the backing.

Finally, did you ever get sick of making the piece?

I enjoyed the weeks of making the prints for the piece. I listened to music and to hundreds of podcasts while I worked on the prints, and I found the repetitiveness of the printing process to be very relaxing. Following that, sewing the paper quilt together was quick and satisfying. Getting the quilt onto the frame though made me want to tear my hair out. Although it was fun to set up a work station in the middle of the large gallery at the Anderson and to spend time with everyone who works there, I have to admit that I was definitely ready for everything to be finished by the time the quilt was attached.