KAPRALOS Fat Quarter

50cm x 70cm section of fabric, known as a fat quarter.

The fat quarter can be considered as an artwork in its own right, hung or framed. It is also the perfect size for crafting and sewing projects, for integrating into quilting, patchwork, small pieces, and detailing.

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The winter is when the sea really shows herself in all her joy and her sadness. 

It's November and the sea is perhaps at her most glorious on Aegina. She is still warm from the summer sun, but less harsh, her edges beginning to soften. The flotsam and jetsam, scraped away during the summer months to create a perfect illusion for tourists, is finally allowed to simply exist.

The microplastics that litter the beaches on the north of the island are beyond anything I had imagined possible. I do not understand how the sea can hold so much waste and still look so perfect to the uninitiated eye.

I often find it hard just to sit and do nothing on a beach – I need an activity to engage with where I am, and I often make little collections of shells, stones, feathers as a way of getting to know what a place is made from. In this case it is the plastic I choose to focus my attention on. As we sit on the beach in the late morning sun and the children play on the shoreline, I start to collect small pieces of this confetti-coloured scrap, holding in my hand just a few small fragments of the mass which has been pushed ashore by the waves. 

I take this handful and sit down with my friends by the shore and we talk, and I idly start placing the pieces next to each other on the flat sand, creating a mosaic between my feet. What comes out is surprisingly pleasing – a kind of pop version of the polished terrazzo encountered so often in Greek homes. I complete a small square, about fifteen centimetres across, and I have just enough time to take a photograph of it before a wave comes and takes it: first the edges, then the whole, in a greedy swallow. These larger waves are the belated message that a big boat has just gone by. We haven't noticed it come and go as we busy ourselves at the shining edge of the water. 

I have just a single photograph documenting this ephemeral little mosaic. The photo proves the existence of beauty inside even the most tragic of our actions: humanity's failure to protect the oldest and most precious resource we have, the water. And that photo becomes the basis of KAPRALOS.

Christos Kapralos (1909-1993) was an artist who lived on Aegina, in a house, now a museum, which overlooks this beach. The colours of his work, and the mosaic pathways which connect his home, studio, and the encircling beach, inform the design of this fabric. It is on this shore that we, as artists, ocean, and material process, meet.

KAPRALOS is a textile design printed on a calico cotton. 
There are only ten metres of this fabric in existence.