Reflections on Festival quilts - Art Quilts

I was interested that this year there were far fewer quilts which I'd have liked to take home and hang to live with. I also felt that there were far more quilts which failed to excite any spark in me at all - so in some ways this was a big disappointment.
The winner in this section "Octopussy" by Janneke de Vries-Bodzinga was exquisitely constructed and stitched but it wasn't one of the quilts that "spoke" to me.

Two quilts which made me stop and look in detail, "Herculaneum" by Susan Hotchkis and "Jugs 2" by Hillary Beattie had features which I felt were different and interesting. Susan Hotchkis' use of printed and waxed brown paper was very effective and really did give an aged effect. I enjoyed seeing hand stitching in Hilary Beattie's quilt it provided a effective contrast.

There was a very high concentration of quilting on the pieces chosen by judges and I was surprised to see a number of pieces that were smaller than the competition size that had still been hung. A number of pieces were stitched in such a way that they failed to hand flat - impossible to know if this was intentional or not!