FOUNDATIONS REVEALED COMPETITION ENTRY
Through Marco Polo’s Eyes
(click images to to enlarge)
Outline the story …
Through Marco Polo’s Eyes is based on Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino. A fictional take on The Travels of Marco Polo, explorer Marco Polo visits emperor Kublai Khan and recounts his travels to the cities in Khan's empire as the pair sit on a stone balcony under the shade of a magnolia tree. The book encompasses this single conversation. Within it, each city is illustrated through descriptions of their key features, inhabitants, or origin stories, and similar cities are grouped into chapters. In between the chapters, the dialogue continues, and Khan begins to question the reality of the cities as Polo becomes more fantastical with his descriptions. It is up to the reader to decide whether the cities Polo is talking about are actually real, and many have concluded that Polo is merely making things up from his memory and experiences of traveling. Since the cities really only exist in the conversation and inside his head, Polo as a character is the embodiment of these stories. Because of this, I have positioned the leaves on the top of the robe over the city quilt blocks and added the balcony on the bottom to illustrate how the cities exist within Polo and his conversation with Kublai Khan. I titled this project Through Marco Polo’s Eyes because not only does he see the magnolia leaves and the balcony while he is there with the emperor, he sees the cities in his memory and mind’s eye.
Outline the construction…
Struck by the intricate and regal style of the 18th-century banyan, I was inspired to illustrate Marco Polo’s experiences of the largest empire in the world would be through a garment of a similar structure. And as history would have it, the banyan originates from the Japanese kimono and similarly designed Mongol robes popular during Kublai Khan’s empire. All fabric, other than the felt for the leaves, was reused. Each square illustrates a different city, and I painted each with acrylic paint mixed with fabric medium, set it with an iron, and outlined and added details with fabric markers. This project allowed me to hone my quilting, topstitching, and construction skills and forced me to get much better at hand sewing for the binding on the inside. As the biggest project I have embarked on to date, the garment required many steps to create, making me slow my process and consider each choice carefully. Because of how many things I needed to do, I also had to use my time differently which proved to be a challenge. I set myself an even tighter schedule since I was moving back to college in early January - and in the process learned that an encroaching sewing deadline is much more stressful than one for a school project.
Love the depth of the story in the jacket! Just wonderful work!
thank you so much! depth was something I was definitely going for!
Wonderful quilting and paintings!
thank you so much!
Wow, each square handdone. Love the leaves. This is really something special. Well done!
thank you so much! I really love the leaves too – they turned out exactly how I was hoping and it was such an a-ha moment when I had the idea to add them!
This is so creative! I love how the jacket combines different crafts – painting, quilting and sewing.
thank you so much! having a bunch of different crafts within one project allowed me to flex my creative muscles and keep myself interested when it got tedious.
that’s one of my favorite books and I really like the jacket ! it looks very comfy too.
thank you! It is actually pretty heavy but that makes it even cozier. I really love the book too and I wish more people knew about it!
Dear Alice,
I couldn‘t believe my eyes when I read that you painted all the squares for the jacket yourself! You did such a beautiful, neat job creating this costume. Its relation to the story is really creative 😊 I hope you wear that gorgeous piece proudly!
thank you so much Clara! I really enjoyed bringing each city to life even though it was tedious to paint all 55 of them.
I love the book and I love your wearable version. Congratulations!
thank you so much! as soon as I heard the prompt for the competition I knew I was going to do it with this book!
I love the thought that went into creating this jacket, it is really effective at telling the story! I could spend ages examining each of the individual city paintings! Such an amazing idea and I’m impressed by the amount of work that went into making this! Well done!
thank you so much! when it was finally done i just went square by square and appreciated all of them since they took so much work. coming up with the designs for each city was exhausting but fun – i got to bring to life what i saw in my head while i was reading! (if you’re interested, i’m thinking of posting some of the closeups of the cities to my instagram, @left.handed.scissors !)
i love this! your illustrations are charming, evocative in a storybook way. I love how you created the structure of your robe by considering the story in a structural way– what lies between balustrade and canopy, making the invisible visible between. and your stitching looks crisp and clean, inside and out. good luck! (from icarus) 🙂
thank you so so much! i feel like a robe is a great garment to tell a story with, and i took that quite literally here! i’m so glad that the trees and balcony came together the way i pictured in my head!