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?
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 …
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!
Winding down to the New Year, we’re in what many call the silly season. There are lots of TV and newspaper reviews of everything we’ve been following or missed this year – local, national and world events of note, including natural and man-made disasters and inspiring rescues, best book and movie lists, prizes won by various national and international celebrities, sporting highlights, trends in absolutely everything from fashion, travel and more, too many wars, notable obituaries… and there are still 3 more days of it to endure while we wait for New Year to break out all around the world…
Montevideo is really quiet at this time of year, and activities Mike and I do together if we’re home, include having a BBQ lunch and reading out on the patio. We give ourselves a nightly episode of some series on Netflix, and last night finished the final episode of the final series of The Crown, so we’ll be auditioning a couple of new ones tonight. I’m also about to look at what’s on in the movie theatres. This time of year, I’m sure that whatever time we go, there’ll be about 6 people in the theatre. And while my mahjong and book club are suspended for the next few weeks, I have more time to turn attention to a few ideas in sample making in my sewing room or ‘studio’, which I always think is too fancy a word for my workspace, but whatever.
“Square Dancing” 2023, 30cm square.
Today I photographed this 30cm square work, tidied up the required maximumum 50 word statement, and well ahead of the closing date, actually submitted it to an online exhibition call that I’ve been planning to enter for several months. It’s been kicking around ‘almost finished’ for several weeks, and although to you it might not look finished, it actually is. The off-kilter fused fabric squares form a wonky grid that gradually gets more out of line, and this seemed to need unfinished edges. If I exhibit it in person I’ll attach it to a plain coloured canvas stretcher, or recommend framing so that none of the raw edges are hidden. In a previous post I referred to ‘rules based disorder‘ which I sort of forgot about when I named it Dancing Squares, but perhaps that’s better as a big concept title for a much larger work….
Some of the fibreartists I most admire work in the 2-3m range, and I’d love to as well, but the size and shape of my workroom make it harder for me to manage in terms of working space, and although my table area does allow domestic machine quilting, I’m avoiding it as my arthritic neck, back arm joints do better with hand stitching. A couple of painters I most admire work around 50cm – so I’m starting to think smaller, and hope I’ll eventually settle on a uniform small size.
Many contemporary textile artists have turned to hand stitch which many people call ‘slow stitch’ – the title of an actual movement that has grown in popularity over the past decade, surrounded by a somewhat almost spiritual mystique. ‘Slow’ in this case means taking your time, being ‘mindful’, contemplating life (or your navel) while carefully considering how you place each stitch, as if somehow this makes the sewing or mending especially precious. Perhaps it does in a way, but I feel no need to literally stitch slowly; carefully executed stitches can be pretty speedy, too. And, my meditation takes the form of recorded books or podcasts to keep my mind occupied while I work through a project. (I’ve written earlier about this term, which I find a bit pretentious, and don’t use)Much more awesome to me is how the ancient needle and thread roots of modern fibre or textile art brought us to where ‘stitch’ in all its forms is rightfully celebrated as a medium of personal expression today.
Ancient peoples in different regions of the world began sewing skins together at different times, so it is hard to be definitive here, but the concept of humans ‘sewing’ as a means of joining skins goes back at least 20,000-40,000 years and probably longer. Many things humans do for practical reasons become refined and eventually also take on decorative roles in the long process of being handed down from generation to generation, and quite often the decorative role eventually outweighs the practical as the raison d’etre of the activity. Hence, at least from the time of the earliest Egyptians ~3000BC, we come to the notion of embroidery on a garment or household textile item decorated with additional stitched patterning. It’s a very human desire to decorate both every day objects and special items we use.
Sample of my own design, made in a kantha workshop with Dorothy Caldwell; stitched area ~6cm.
In my 50s Australian childhood, embroidery was often referred to as ‘fancywork’. As a child, I certainly learned a lot from the competent knitters, sewists and embroiderers in the family, but back then girls at school were also taught the basics of sewing and embroidery. It still astonishes me to remember making a doll’s bed cover in grade 3, aged 8, featuring a hand stitched hem on the long sides, fringed ends, my initials embroidered in chain stitch, and a little iron-on transfer of the 3 bears, using straight, chain and stem stitches (sadly it disappeared decades ago) I wish my grade 3 teacher, Mrs. Clayton, was still with us to see how much I’ve done in my life from her patient teaching that year. Half way along one of the side hems she pointed out I was stitching from the wrong direction (left to right) and so made me unpick it and sew it from from right to left. I always think of her when I slip stitch a hem and really, whether its L-R or R-L depends on which way around you’re holding it, and you can do it either way – but I do it the way she made me then, and I love stitching a hem or binding … As a young homemaker beginning in 1969, I collected the weekly crafts magazine “Golden Hands” loaded with ideas and instructions for many kinds of embroidery, crochet, knitting, dressmaking, needlepoint, beading and more. In 1976 I signed on for a creative embroidery correspondence course through the Embroiderers’ Guild of New South Wales for a couple of years, which was great, because we were living in remote northern Australia at the time. Each month a lesson with instructions, fabrics and threads came in the mail, and after working it I sent it back for critique. I’ve only just now fully appreciated the importance of that course in my development as a fibreartist, including that I abandoned it a year early because I began deviating from the coloured threads provided, and substituting what I thought was better; the teacher’s pedantic comments became irritating, no matter how high she was in the pantheon of EGA NSW teacher experts. In 1978, while living in Mt. Isa, Far North Queensland, I went to a 10 day creative embroidery summer school in South Australia, where I learned the basics of free machine embroidery, soft sculpture, stitching on painted fabric, and the importance of designing stitched works around my own observations or experiences. That workshop is perhaps the most enduring influence on my work today. In 1987 I was invited to exhibit my creative embroidery by one of Australia’s then foremost creative embroiderers and teachers, the late Rusty Walkley. Shortly after that we moved to live for a while in the USA. Without a work visa, I set about studying traditional American geometric patchwork, just as the rotary cutter was revolutionising P&Q, and both piecing and quilting were increasingly being done by machine. In the very creative circles in which I found myself in Denver CO, my interest turned to non-traditional art quilt making, where ever since I’ve exercised the freedom to use every surface design and stitch technique I wish to.
The result is that my fibreart today draws on a variety of techniques, but it continues to be very low tech, as it always has been. A domestic sewing machine is the most sophisticated tool I currently use, although I was very tempted a few years ago to buy a laser cutter, but eventually didn’t.
Just after the pandemic broke out in early 2020, the TextileArtist.org began a new online educational venture called StitchClub. (further information here ) One great thing about SC is that many of the teachers encourage the use of repurposed fabrics and household waste items for their technique based workshops. However, I’ve stayed away from the ones that absoutely require specialised materials, chiefly because these days I try to use only what is already in my stash, not go out and buy more stuff! And, in planning and making my own work, I rarely need anything specific. From decades of remote living I’m accustomed to making do, adapting to using what’s around. The SC and many other good quality online workshops like FibreArts Take Two, and others set up independently by prominent teachers in the last few years, have given many stitchers/embroiderers a new or renewed absorbing interest in hand stitching in all its iterations – hand stitch, slow stitch, embroidery, fancywork or whatever else you call it.
Apart from the documented benefits of reducing tension and anxiety, another great thing about the rise in hand stitch’s popularity is that it encourages total novices to pick up a needle and thread and discover the pleasures and benefits of needleart using just the simplest stitches and the simplest equipment of all – their hands. Of course there’s a whole flock of people running courses, writing books and teaching classes on ‘slow stitch’, ‘meditative mending’ and ‘meaningful stitching’, and their projects and demos are usually based on recycling clothing and domestic textiles to give fabrics on which to stitch, but this also helps prevent or at least postpones those fabrics going into landfills. So, on the whole, ‘slow stitch’ scores very high in virtue signalling.… which takes us back again to the spiritual, cult-like atmosphere around it.
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