WHY PATCHWORK DESIGN?

This year I had an incredible teacher in the subject Discourse and Text who explained which the features of language are. She spoke about the texture language has, the ability to make all elements work together in an articulated or non articulated manner. The form it has, what its structure is. All the elements -even if tiny words- work together to create a larger element. There is always an internal unity. It is always (whether spoken or written) a unified whole.

The thread that forms a piece of cloth could be a tiny element, then, some more words, or even phrases or sentences put together could be one of these patchwork squares. And if we put together the squares, we can get short or huge texts. But they are always linked to another thread of another square.

This roughly explains cohesion (lol). Why we can find a lot of lexical repetition throughout a long text, substitution without losing track of what is meant and so on.

This brilliant teacher showed us a close-up picture of a piece of cloth, so at first sight we couldn't really identify what it was. This way she also emphasised the necessity of getting information about the context. Hence, if we only see the threads (according to the visual metaphor: only some words) we can't guess what it is/its meaning. But later on, as she showed us another image in which we could see the whole piece, we knew what it was. A beautiful lesson!

So I thought that a patchwork background is a nice visual metaphor to extend this idea. Not to speak about the fact that we can perceive language as colorful, playful and creative as creating a patchwork blanket... 

These images are only examples that illustrate the idea I explained before. They are not the actual images my teacher used.