Art From Earth From Above

After reading so many wonderful blogs, I've decided to give it a whirl myself. I'm not a techie so I will be simple.

This is a little piece I made in 2012, my first to be in an exhibit. The exhibit, put together by Caron Lage, is titled Art From Earth From Above and is based on the aerial photos shot by French photographer Yann Arthus-Bertrand for his "Earth from Above" series of books. The exhibit will travel around Minnesota and North Dakota for a year.

I chose a photograph of Hittite ruins in Turkey. My piece is about 16 inches by 12 inches.  Right below it is the Yann Arthus-Bertrand photo that was my prompt.

                                     

I made one inch half-square triangles for the terrain and added pieces of a cut-up crocheted doily for the ruins and a beaded ribbon for a river passing through the ruins. There is no actual river in the photo, just a dirt-track road. I turned the road into a beautiful river. A river is a good symbol.

In my piece, some of the green triangles between the river and the ruins have dark red dots, representing Armenian blood.

Here I am in 2011, in Afyon, Turkey, the town in which my Armenian maternal grandfather was born and raised. He left Turkey in August, 1914 with a scholarship to Macalester College in St. Paul, shortly before the onset of the Armenian Genocide in April, 1915, in which he lost his family. He never returned to Turkey. My husband and I climbed the long, steep path to the top of the rocky tor, the site of a restored Hittite fortress that dominates all the town's views. At the foot of the tor is the old Armenian neighborhood, most of its late-19th century homes well-preserved and occupied, with no record of Armenians ever having lived there.

We stayed in Afyon for one night, in a slightly tatty but elegant hotel. No one spoke more than a few words and phrases in English. Here is the large repeated motif on the bedspread of one the beds in our spacious hotel room, which could have accommodated a whole family:

~Andrea