La Silla Observatory

Title: La Silla Observatory

Maker: Heather Brialey

Techniques used:

"The stars are machine stitched. The undergrowth in the foreground is free motion stitched. The reflective highlights on the observatory are painted with markal sticks and further defined with some hand stitching."

Inspiration:

"My square was inspired by several different time lapse photographs of la Silla observatory at night which I sourced from the ESO website.

I really liked the fact that the original quilt which inspired the project, was used as a forerunner of an audio visual aid when teaching students. I understand that La Silla was one of the original observatories and as such has its own place in history, so it deserves to be represented on the 200th anniversary quilt. Chile and the Atacama desert is on our bucket list of places to go but sadly postponed (like a lot of things) by the Coronavirus during 2020. I very much enjoyed representing the observatory in cloth, paint and stitch as it was something different to anything that I have tried to depict up to this point."