The summer exhibition of quilts at Cletwr presents work by Malinda Law.

Malinda lives in Staffordshire, but since she graduated from Aberystwyth University in the 1980s she has been spending a lot of her time in Borth. She is also an enthusiastic Welsh learner.

She explains that many of her quilts are made in a hurry and that they are planned to be used to sleep under. She recycles material from a variety of sources.

Of her jubilee quilt, she explains that “the bunting is just that – bits of the Silver Jubilee bunting my mother-in-law and her friends made for their street in 1977”.

Several of Malinda’s quilts relate to Covid-19. When the fear of possible death from the pandemic hit early in 2020, she decided to use fabrics that she had around the house to make bags for NHS workers and to create lasting memories in textile.

“I decided to make a quilt; one which would say something about me to anyone who survived the pandemic,” she said.

“Thus the solitary figures or family bubbles are all socially distancing in their own squares, demarcated by rings of quilting. Their tabards spell out the government messages.”

However, Malinda’s messages are formed in a more complex way. She made one using Welsh letters and another English, and included figures spelling out messages in semaphore.

For the Welsh quilt she used an old electric blanket for wadding, and dyed an old sheet for additional black fabric.

Another of Malinda’s enthusiasms is for geocaching. She said: “By autumn 2020 solitary outdoor pastimes like geocaching were back so I began to place a series of caches local to my home village, each with a puzzle to be solved before the hidden box could be found. My final Covid quilt is part of a puzzle: if you know Morse code (and Welsh), it gives the key passage to decode a secret message.”

Visitors to Cletwr will also see a large quilt that maps the Dysynni Estuary and another the part of the coast around Borth.