Dawn Hunter's South Carolina Sunshine
FOUNDATIONS: ARTS 103
Quilting Bee: Deconstruction and Reconstruction
by Dawn Hunter, Project Author
and ARTS 103 Course Director
“There is nothing wrong with having a tree as a friend.” —Bob Ross
Quilting Bee asks students to reconsider artwork they have already made as material for new visual thinking. Using high-quality photocopies of paintings created during earlier artist studies, students cut their previous work into one-inch squares and reconstruct those fragments within an 18 × 18-inch grid. The resulting composition establishes a repeat pattern interrupted by an anomaly.
At first glance, this project follows a predetermined format, but its conceptual meaning is much greater. Instead of describing a favorite tree literally, students use pattern, texture, repetition and variation as well as anomaly to metaphorically represent the tree. Marks and textures originally created in response to another artist are removed from their previous context and given new visual and conceptual functions.
Student Artwork | Artist Study and Quilting Bee: Picasso
The student created high-quality photocopies of paintings developed through an earlier study of Picasso's work and cut the reproductions into one-inch squares. By reorganizing fragments of value, texture, and painted marks within the grid, the student transformed material from the previous assignment into a repeat pattern incorporating an anomaly.
Continued, Quilting Bee
The project therefore operates through two related processes: deconstruction and reconstruction. Students physically dismantle earlier paintings while also reconsidering what their existing visual information can become.
Progression figure, Quilting Bee: Deconstruction and Reconstruction. From left: Alberto Giacometti’s The Studio; a student artist-study painting interpreting Giacometti’s work; and the student’s subsequent Quilting Bee composition. The student photocopied the earlier painting, cut the reproductions into one-inch squares, and re-contextualized the fragments to create a repeat pattern with an anomaly. The sequence demonstrates how visual information developed in one assignment is retrieved, deconstructed, transformed, and reconstructed to address a new formal and conceptual problem.
Re-contextualizing Previous Work
Quilting Bee is sourced from paintings produced by students in earlier lessons of the course when studying the work of artists such as Picasso, Chagall, Mondrian and Matisse within the context of a specific assignment. In Quilting Bee these paintings are used as a source of marks, values, shapes and textures.
Photocopying the individual paintings and then cutting them into one-inch squares of paint means that the brushstrokes originally used to draw a figure, object, branch or background are now re-worked as abstract units of value or texture. Once extracted from its original context, the fragment can be repeated, rotated, relocated, or combined with other fragments to perform an entirely different visual role.
This process introduces students to re-contextualization: visual information does not have a permanently fixed function. Its meaning and formal role can change when its context changes.
Student Artwork | Artist Study to Quilting Bee
The original artist-study painting, left, becomes the source material for the Quilting Bee composition, right. After making high-quality copies of the painting, the student cut the reproductions into one-inch squares and reorganized the fragments into a repeat pattern with anomalies. Shapes, lines, values, and painted marks that originally described objects in the still life are removed from their first context and transformed into a new geometric visual system. The pairing demonstrates how students deconstruct, re-contextualize, and reconstruct their previous work to create new visual meaning.
From Previous Knowledge to a New Problem
Quilting Bee is intentionally dependent upon earlier coursework. Students cannot approach the project as an isolated exercise because its raw material already carries the history of decisions made in previous assignments.
This makes the project an important point in the recursive structure of ARTS 103. Students retrieve previous work, identify useful visual information within it, deconstruct that information, and adapt it to a new problem. What was once a finished painting becomes source material for another creative process.
The progression can be understood as:
PREVIOUS WORK → SELECTION → DECONSTRUCTION → RECONTEXTUALIZATION → RECONSTRUCTION → NEW MEANING
Students are therefore not simply repeating something they already know how to do. They are learning that previous knowledge and previous artwork can be transformed when the conditions of a problem change.
Student Artwork | Artist Study to Quilting Bee
The student’s artist study of Picasso, left, becomes the source material for the Quilting Bee composition, right. After reproducing the painting, the student deconstructed it into one-inch squares and reorganized the fragments into a repeat pattern with anomalies. Brushstrokes, shapes, lines, and passages of value that originally functioned within a figurative composition are re-contextualized as abstract visual information. The resulting work demonstrates how students retrieve material from an earlier assignment and transform it to address a new formal and conceptual problem.
Pattern, Anomaly, and Visual Structure
The one-inch grid provides a common structure for every student, but it does not prescribe the resulting composition. Within that structure, students must develop a repeat pattern using differences in value, texture, shape, direction, and visual density.
An anomaly interrupts the repetition. Rather than functioning as an arbitrary decorative variation, the anomaly becomes a focal point and introduces difference within an otherwise predictable system. Students consider what happens visually when repetition establishes an expectation and a single element—or group of elements—breaks that expectation.
The grid consequently operates as both a limitation and a generative structure. The same one-inch module can produce dramatically different compositions depending upon how students select, organize, repeat, and interrupt their source material.
Using Formal Language to Communicate Metaphor
The conceptual prompt asks students to describe a favorite tree without necessarily depicting a tree.
Instead, students consider qualities associated with that tree: movement, stability, growth, memory, rhythm, density, fragility, strength, transcendence, or other personal associations. They then determine how those ideas might be communicated through the formal language available to them.
Texture can suggest a sensation or atmosphere. Repetition can imply rhythm or continuity. Changes in value can establish movement or emphasis. An anomaly can signify disruption, individuality, transformation, or another idea generated through the student's metaphor.
At this point in the course, formal elements and design principles begin to function as tools for communicating something beyond themselves. Pattern, texture, value, repetition, and focal point are no longer simply concepts to demonstrate; students use them to construct meaning.
The Assignment Sheet
Click on the assignment for the full page to pop-up!
Collaboration and Brainstorming
The project incorporates a collaborative brainstorming process inspired by the communal nature suggested by the title Quilting Bee. Students work with a partner to review their available photocopies, discuss possible metaphors, compare textures and marks, and generate different approaches to the repeat pattern and anomaly.
Partners may exchange source material, but each student ultimately creates an individual composition. Collaboration functions as a means of expanding possibilities rather than producing a shared final work.
Students are encouraged to ask one another how a mark might change when removed from its previous environment, which textures could support a particular idea, and how the organization of the grid might reinforce the intended metaphor. In this way, discussion becomes another form of experimentation.
Why “Quilting Bee”?
The title Quilting Bee reflects both the structure of the project and its origins in my own experience growing up in the rural Midwest. Quilting bees and the reuse of fabric were familiar parts of that environment. Scraps retained from earlier purposes could be cut, rearranged, combined, and transformed into something new.
That process provided the conceptual foundation for this assignment. Instead of fabric, students work with fragments of their own previous paintings. Existing material is not discarded simply because its original purpose has been fulfilled. It becomes a resource that can be dismantled, reconsidered, and reconstructed.
The analogy is especially appropriate to a Foundations curriculum because it emphasizes that creative development does not always require beginning again. Making can also involve returning, selecting, transforming, and rebuilding.
Student Artwork | Artist Studies and Quilting Bee: Deconstruction and Reconstruction
These student works demonstrate the progression from earlier artist-study paintings to the Quilting Bee project. Students photocopied their paintings, cut the reproductions into one-inch squares, and re-contextualized the fragments within a grid to create repeat patterns with an anomaly. Shown together, the works illustrate how previously created visual information can be deconstructed, transformed, and reconstructed to communicate new formal and metaphorical ideas.
Deconstruction and Reconstruction as Transfer
Within the larger sequence of ARTS 103, Quilting Bee represents a significant transition toward independent visual thinking. Earlier projects establish skills in observation, composition, positive and negative space, planar form, texture, repetition, and visual organization. Here, students must retrieve aspects of that developing knowledge and determine how to use them in a different context.
The physical procedure mirrors the intellectual process. Students literally cut apart previous work, but they are also learning to dismantle their assumptions about what that work is and what it can do.
A painting is no longer only a painting. A brushstroke no longer belongs exclusively to the image for which it was originally created. A fragment can become texture; texture can establish pattern; pattern can communicate metaphor; and an interruption in that pattern can create meaning. What students reconstruct is therefore not simply an image.
They reconstruct their relationship to visual information.