Archive for the ‘General’ Category

Making Marks With Stitch

Saturday, February 3rd, 2024

A Uruguayan friend, Laura F, visited the recent glass and textile exhibition Salonlatino Artevidriotextil in which I had a piece. Although I had talked with her about it and sent her the publicity about the works in that show, she later told me she’d instinctively looked about for one of my art quilts (tapices) that she’d always known as my art.

I met Laura here in Uruguay on my first visit in 1989, and it was the year I began making quilted textile art, too – art quilts or tapices as people call them here. I was accompanying husband Mike on a business visit from Denver CO where we were living at the time. A few years later Laura helped arrange a couple of solo exhibitions in Montevideo and in Punta del Este in the early 90s. She had never known my pre-quiltmaking persona as a creative embroiderer, but my first solo exhibition of anything was of embroidered art, “Sunburnt Textures”, Perth, Western Australia, 1987, just before we moved to the USA where I began making quilted textile art. So my piece in the show somewhat suprised Laura, as she had no idea I was “a really very good embroiderer!!”

“Sunburnt Textures” title piece from solo exhibition, 1987.
Detail – with paint+stitch+found objects.

In the last five decades I’ve read many textile and quilt catalogues, visited websites, browsed on Pinterest, participated in and attended fibreart exhibitions, met many makers and taken some amazing workshops with some special teachers. After such a long time, there are many artists whose work I instantly recognise in an online exhibition, a magazine or a Pinterest page. By this I mean that whatever they do, a certain signature aura shows up in any image of their work. Such a signature comes from how they combine different elements in a work including techniques, materials, patterns and imagery used, and the use of colour – collectively forming the artist’s style. On a more personal level, when an artist’s emotions and feelings are presented through their unique style, their voice reaches the viewer. I have always felt that the best artist statement about any piece of art is a well chosen, brief title, and whether it comes with a written statement is usually not important to me, but I find some statements can help some viewers interpret what they see a bit more deeply.

Textile artists whose work I easily recognise and really love because it always resonates with me, include Dorthy Caldwell, Emily Barletta , Carolyn Nelson , Bonnie Sennot , Roberta Wagner , Annita Romano , Marian Bijengla , but there are many more. And there are several non-textile artists whose work I adore because they make marks in repeat patterns that always make me think of texture in stitch, so I feel akin to each of them, even though I don’t know the first thing about any of their media. These are generative artist the late Vera Molnar, glass artist Giles Bettison and painter Shane Drinkwater.

Like all the above artists, I don’t do pictorial textile art, and my semi abstract works might more properly be likened to craftsmen like weavers, knitters and traditional embroiderers and more who glory in repeat patterns. My own patterns are not usually rigidly repetitive, but are more akin to the general but recognisable patterns of the earth’s surface textures and the structures within its crust, from where a lot of my inspiration comes. I’m considering signing up for a Sue Stone workshop in repeat pattern and texture when it opens for registration next. Even though Sue’s embroideries are not the kind of thing I do, at all, there’s a disconnect that might take me in an interesting direction with my own art.

Segmented Strips of Fabric

Monday, January 29th, 2024

Many art quilt makers and all traditional quiltmakers find ourselves with scraps and offcuts at the end of every project. I believe these two words are in are interchangeable, although I myself think of offcuts as being ‘larger’ scraps. However, everything is relative, and there is no precision here. I tend to save pieces as small as about 2 square inches, depending on how precious it is to me, but I’ll skip defining ‘precious’ just now.

My regular readers know I’ve been using strips of fabric in my work for decades – I just love segmented strips of colour. I’ve both pieced them into backgrounds –

and since 2020-21 I’ve also been laying them onto the fabric background and overstitching them, a process called ‘couching’ in embroideryspeak.

Testing – a strip oversewn in several different black threads.

If I had a dollar for every time someone has commented “You do such intricate patchwork!!” I’d be wealthy !

Dark and light scrap assemblies before cutting across to produce segmented strips.

But my readers know the starting point is to machine sew varying widths of strips, long side to side, and cut across those groups of strips. I use pretty small stitching so that when I cut across these ‘collections’ of fabric bits, to make strips varying from 0.5 to 1.5 cm wide, they hold together well in the handling.

In the past week I’ve been working on two segmented strip projects. In one, I’ve dipped into my large quantity of blue-green scraps to form strips oversewn with neon green stitching. Sized 30cm square or 12″x12″, my 2024 SAQA Auction quilt is well advanced –

And finally, I’m now in the strip assembling stage of desert coloured scraps to use in a much larger work, as you might assume from these ~1m+ strips. The background fabric could be black, cream, or a burnt gold which I might dull down a bit by overdyeing it… or maybe none of those, but there’s plenty of time.

Strip assemblies for use in a larger work with a desert landscape theme.

The Power of Sample Making

Friday, January 19th, 2024

I wish I had about another sets of hands, duplicate equipment and work spaces, so that I could follow several different ideas at a time – but dream on, Alison!

Well, one way to capture those ideas as they pop up in my mind is to make a quick sample, so that the ‘essence’ of that idea is there when I have time to come back to it and explore. I occasionally reach for my set of 100 x 3.5inch technique samples I mounted each day on foam core during the 2021 SAQA Reboot 100 day challenge – and here are some favourites, and a couple of those technical ideas have found their way into things I’ve done since.

Some favourites from the 2021 100 day challenge ...

One of the enduring inspirational themes in my art is ‘landscape’ in it’s broadest sense. Much of what I do is repeat units of diagrams in fabric and thread of recurring patterns of lines and shapes. In 2022 I acquired some fabric scraps from a fellow art quilter in USA. After adding more of my own, many of them wound up in lines, or strips, of pieced patches of colour –

So yesterday’s sample suddenly offered new potential for crossing over strips of pieced fabric onto a background and achieve a greater sense of depth…

Oh yes, and have I ever said that green is my favourite colour?

Glass & Textile Exhibition – Maldonado, Uruguay

Tuesday, January 16th, 2024

On January 4th last, I attended the opening of the Salonlatino Artevidriotextil exhibition, in which twenty five 20x20cm 2D selected works by artists from a number of South American countries, including myself, are showing in one of the galleries in the beautiful Casa de la Cultura in the heart of Maldonado, Uruguay. There’s a really nice online catalogue https://qrco.de/begBj6 which I recommend you take time to look through, with some very interesting works and accompanying artist statements. However, those statements were not displayed in the exhibition itself, only the details of the artist, title of the work, techniques and materials used, and their country of origin.  The catalogue’s in spanish of course, but easily translated using google translate.  

Several pieces referenced weaving and basketry, and others added beading or glass shapes to textile and embroidered areas.  I had the opportunity to read all the statements a day or two before it opened, but inevitably there were one or two surprises, as there always are in a juried show.  

“Semillas del rey Inti” by Carolina Oliva Salas, Chile.

The work of Chilean artist, Carolina Oliva Salas, “Semillas del rey Inti” was my favourite in the whole exhibition. (p10 of the catalogue)  Translated, her statement reads “Seeds of King Inti symbolize the spirit of the Sun for the ancestral Latin American peoples, for whom it has great importance, symbolism and veneration.  Ancient cultures considered the Sun as the “God creator of life”, and they worshipped him with all kinds of rituals.  Most pre-Columbian people worshipped the Sun fundamentally because it provided them with abundant crops and was also a symbol of prestige and power.”   The symbolism of the eggs set in felted eggshells, and the connection of all the parts to the sun and Inca gold was well thought out and presented.

Here I am talking with Carolina as we exchanged our Instagram handles – I was one of the few who was handing out business cards – so are these still a thing?
“Mexico en sus flores”, Olimpia de la Corona, Mexico.

I loved Mexican artist Olimpia de la Corona’s piece, “Mexican Flower” (p 23), featuring a plant native to southern Mexico, “Flor de Nochebuena” or Poinsettia. Sometimes writing a blog post is a learning exercise – today I learned that the Aztecs used the plants to provide dyes for fabric and cosmetics. and much more about their history. Elsewhere I read that from the early 1700s the Francisan monks began to decorate nativity and religious displays at Christmas with the red-petalled flowers. The central section of this work is a hand stitched panel in the characteristic style of the state of Hidalgo, (I own, and use, several pieces of embroidery from there myself) in which the stitching is worked so that most of the thread appears on the front of the work – and in the catalogue you’ll find a pic of the reverse side of this work illustrating that. This embroidery is surrounded by a lovely border of finely worked glass in the style of other Mexican textiles, and the antique-finished frame sets it off beautifully.

Argentine artist Patricia Veronica Saporiti’s work “Boston” (p 24) comprised 4 x 10cm panels with appliqued coloured glass pieces connected by chain stitched lines, and it was so much more beautiful on the wall than in the catalogue: 

“Boston”, Patricia Veronica Saporiti, Argentina.

My own work used fibreglass fabric backed by a layer of nylon organza for stability, to which I added some trapunto areas, hand embroidery and beading, all of which was in effect quilting, so by SAQA’s definition it is ‘a quilt’, although I never use that term for anything so small.

Below the Tideline / Debujo de la Linea de Marea, 20cm sq.

It’s an interesting idea to ask artists to combine two unlikely materials, and this call to present a work combining textile and glass materials and techniques is possibly an international first. I’m hoping the organisers will make it a biennial or triennial, because I’m already thinking about another one … 

Monday, January 8th, 2024

I wrote a little while back that this wall quilt had been accepted for a Studio Art Quilt Associates juried online/virtual gallery, but showed only the detail in that post, because my quirky policy is to never show the full image of a new work until it hs been published or exhibited somewhere. As the “Geometric Expressions” gallery went live this week, here is “The Shimmer Effect” in full:

I love concentric squares, and I love the traditional Nine Patch quilt block. so beloved of quiltmakers – and here both elements are blended into the design for this work.

My artist statement about this work reads – “A square symbolises balance, solidity and stability.  Hand stitching over concentric squares in gentle neutral colours calmed my unease at current disorder and chaos in the world.  Metallic threads in my work signify value or importance, here referencing tradition and hope.

Close detail, “The Shimmer Effect, 2022. Each square is ~6cm.

I posted about it while making this quilt as it was such a long project. It’s about 1m square, with each concentric square unit being ~6cm, with a total of 121 squares of fused nylon organza strips oversewn by hand in metallic thread. The fabric used in the squares has a subtle glittery texture. The grey background is plain cotton.

This blog is really my artist’s diary, or the nearest I will ever come to keeping one, but I also post on Instagram, @schwabealison, too, and that tends to be where things pop up, sometimes from the archives, before they are eventually bound into a post on this site. Cheers!

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