What brought these thoughts to mind is  that today a well known quilt artist, Nancy Cook, asked two or three thousand of her art quilting colleagues on two lists for their suggestions for a name for her most recent work, which she commented is an entry for Quilt National’11 (entries close in a week, she is running against the clock here!)    Occasionally people do this, giving us a blog link to check the piece out and give feedback.  I just had never seen someone openly looking for a title for a QN entry although probably it has been done often enough -  but usually who would know? 

I linked through to the image on her blog.  Nancy said this is not the exact one she was entering but (as many of us know she does work in beautiful series)  contains important elements of her actual entry.   Because of my strong view on this -my readers would expect no less ;-p   on principle I didn’t make any title suggestions, but sent her the possible naming approaches I outlined above – which were probably not new to her, and no doubt people have others.  That QN entry form can cause a bit of panic as we all know.  And, most likely, Nancy probably thought of a great name all by herself as soon as she put the call out.   

In my mind anyway, this raised the following issues:

1. If  she were to choose a title suggested by someone in the comment section of her blog, ie this is in a very public way, would it then mean she should include this person’s name on the entry form as a collaborator? 
2. Should the person who suggested the chosen title then expect some % of prize money the maker might be awarded ?

I emailed the kernels of this post to Nancy a few hours ago, before even thinking about blogging on this today – she thanked me for my coments in such a way that I feel sure she will not take this as any kind of personal attack.  So those of you getting up a head of steam to hit me with fiery riposts defending Nancy Cook and her work, please hold your fire, re-read my post and understand this post is not about Nancy and her work, it’s just an interesting entering issue I hadn’t considered before.

And good luck to fellow QN11 entrants!!! – mine’s  already there and processed, according to an acknowledgement email  yesterday.

Here in Perth Western Australia on the first visit for a year, I found this piece of my work had been hung on a wallof one of the bedrooms by the house sitters -  who are not here at present – they like to move things around, and must have found this one behind a door …. anyway I don’t think I have ever taken a photo of it, not recently anyway, and had pretty well forgotten it.   Now there are some design shortcomings, I am the first to acknowledge – it was a while ago!!!    hgowever, it represents a slice-through view of one of the many open cut gold mines in and around Kalgoorlie Western Australia.  It’s done in paint plus stitch – long stem stitches and some small very tiny stitches in thin thread right up on the horizon there representing trees and the odd mining headframe.   It was my (unsuccessful) entry in the City of Kalgoorlie Art Prize exhibition of that year, but I don’t recall exhibiting it after that. 

Apart from my pleasure at seeing it again, what I do think is interesting  is that it clearly and graphically shows my interest in and inspiration from man-altered landscape structures and textures.  Colourwise the Eastern Goldfields of Western Australia is generally clear strong blue skies over red-brown rocks and soil - all in all typical of Outback Australia.  My interpretive, creative embroideries of the time often included paint+stitch.  The lines though, also have since and for a long time appeared in my quilted textile art.  Pardon a pun here, but there’s a line of continuity  between my early works and recent work.  I just thought some might be interested!

And apart from the amazingly close national election from which almost 2 weeks later a clear winner has not yet emerged, and may not; it has been a joy to listen to Australian voices all around.   The other day I overheard a gaggle of women (my husband would say ‘old chooks’ )  chatting over coffee in the morning sun.  Referring to the offsprings of  who knows – grandkids perhaps - one of them said to the others ”… they all managed to have one of each, so they got their bookends”    Good grief !!!!  A foreign visitor would probably not realise this puzzling expression means  parents who produced a boy and a girl – “bookends” – often also referred to as  ’the pigeon pair’.   I nearly choked on my coffee and it kept me smiling all day. 

Beach Offering, With Daisies

I think under the covering of cooked rice it looked as if there was a white dove, but as I never like to disturb these things in any way at all,  I didn’t poke around to check.  The ‘silver’  (plastic) 10″  platter is one that tarts and small quiches in supermarkets come on.  Note the daisies – denoting spring? or  renewal of life? Same sentiments I guess, especially when taken with the eggshell halves.  Winding in and around these, but hard to see, was a ribbon of paper with some symbols and numbers on it, but the symbols I could see made little sense to me.   It’s interesting that although I have little exact idea what the messages are, usually, they always ‘feel’  important there at the edge of the water.  Anyway they’re not for me and other passers-by at all, but reaching out to Imanja, the goddess of the sea herself.

All in all, this one felt like a positive message.

This past week I have been working on a new piece which I hope I will feel OK about as a QN entry, closing date looming fast.  While I work I have been listening to Jane Austen’s “Emma” for the umpteenth time.  Now I know it almost by heart, and to hear it read by the late Prunella Scales makes it especially good listening.  On one level at least it’s really all about communication.  What a vital role communications play in human life, this case C18 England –  the coming and going of letters and notes, observations, personal comments, gossip, scheming, interpretation, being mistaken….  Letters were shared with family and close friends, and everyone knew who had received letters from whom, if not their actual contents – but no matter there – fuel for speculation and gossip anyway.  Everything was discussed endlessly in minute detail.  The deliciously slowly unfolding events in the lives of inhabitants of a small typical C18 English village were moulded daily by communication of all kinds, expecially ‘letters’.  From so far forward in time, looking back many of the communiques seem trivial to us, but it struck me how little has changed, really.  I realised this as we sat around the fire the other evening over a glass of wine, catching up with an old friend – no friend like an old friend, the comfortable experience of being with someone almost as familiar as a family member.  DH showed us something amazing on his laptop, and our friend was occasionally checking his FB messages, commenting on mutual friends’ recent posts, mostly trivial – and as my desktop was just an arm’s reach away, I too logged in to my email to quote something I received from a mutual acquaintance earlier in the week.  We shared family news face to face,  since I had seen several offsprings our visitor knows.  If our old friend had known the distant long-lost cousin I just heard from (much to my delight) then I’d also have brought that into the conversation too.   You’re right !!! that all sounds sooooo Jane Austenish – you can never have too much of her imho, but perhaps when “Emma” finishes I might move onto something more modern – a Jodi Picoult or Henning Mannkell maybe. 

Then this morning on the beach I noticed this bit of communication - 

Lost house keys on display

Hung on a stick wedged into the sand presumably where they were found, I thought this was a useful form of communcation, and I hope the person who lost them comes back to the beach for another look.  The tag on them looked nearly new so they haven’t been lost long.  As one was a gate and the other a door key, the owner may not have realised they were lost until he got home…. 

And finally, I think this cap has a story to tell – it’s been in the water quite a while !! 

Barnacle encrusted baseball cap

It may have initially been lost on a beach, or blown off a passenger’s head on a cruise boat coming down the river – or blown off a yachtsman’s head out in the bay – perhaps last summer or maybe longer ago – but the colour hasn’t dulled much, I looked in the seams – was it beloved or just something handy clapped on to shade a bald head? or a nose? or to go with an outfit? – worn by a guy or a gal?  Ah well, we’ll never know for that line of communication is broken. 

So now, back to the next masterpiece ….. spurred on a bit by someone buying two of my works a few days ago, and an invitation to exhibit along the coast in a few months’ time.

Two young goat's heads and one partial leg - no signs of any other parts.

A few days later this interesting arrangement was down near the incoming tide, right where I usually access the beach – there was no one in sight,  but it cannot have been there long. 

In the early morning light, the orientation, which always feels to me to be the same, is clearly to the south east more or less… towards the Atlantic a couple of hundred miles away from this Montevideo beach at Carrasco. Here it is technically the River Plate, but very wide even at this point and behaves like ocean.

This poignant one above speaks to me of babies, one male and the other female, and very young I’d judge by the feeding bottles and the dummies/comfortors/chupas in pink and blue. Among the flowers are pink and blue ribbons. Are these babies on the way, have they been born and this is a thakyou gesture? Have they been lost? Pulled at my heartstrings, anyway.

And then today, this one, again as in all the pics the heads of the sacrificed birds are all nearest the sea with the bodies arranged in a general SE direction. What was different was the 7 or 8 bags of food (corn in one, beans another, something unidentifiable that looked like stew, and so on) arranged in a circle around them, and a sandy hollow near every bag with the remains of a candle sitting in the sand.   Near the white hen’s head was a jar of something that looked like candied honey – but forgive me – I did not stoop to smell it even, let alone dip my finger in …..

Now that I have been paying serious attention for a while, you can imagine my photo files are expanding and include striking differences in among common themes.  Later this week I will be travelling for a while but will resume my coastal walks when I return – hope I don’t miss something amazing.  I feel like begging one of my friends to take a camera to the beach each day while I’m away ….

I had to move the clutter off the mantlepiece, cover the computer with dust cloth and provide some logs of wood to anchor the huge plastic sheet in place along the shelf.  The floor rug was moved back and newspaper put down – as you can see in the photo that moved around during the process! but at the end it was all bundled up into a large plastic bag and they swept the floor of what little powdery soot was still there.  Mario climbed right into the fireplace, and even if my spanish was brilliant there is no way I could have worked out what on earth he was saying, but clearly these two are a well practised team and even understand jokes delivered with  masks over mouths and noses and a wall of plastic between them.  They came with a variety of brooms some of which they used and others no, I guess they’re prepared for all sizes and shapes of chimneys.  As they swept and moved the brushes higher and higher in the chimney one by one additional steel extenders were screwed on and pushed up the chimney, soot raining down on the newspaper on the floor of the fireplace behind the plastic.  

The whole process was reversed when the brushes come back down.   The verdict was it wasn’t very sooty considering we hadn’t swept it in the 6 years we’ve been here ( I had been a bit nervous about how much stuff was up there – we have wood fires all winter long, and chimney fires are dangerous)    Prep time and cleanup took around an hour – they were very particular – and it all cost a fraction of what I imagine it would cost in Aus or US – 800 pesos or around $40.  It was all fascinating and I remembered to take a couple of pics – oh, and yes, remembered to touch Washington on the sleeve for good luck    – yes, I am a bit superstitious, and who, knows, it can’t hurt, right?

About half an hour after sun-up, on my way back along the beach the  plovers were making a racket at the water’s edge.  I do love them.  They are so noisy, strident and insistent, quite bossy.

Inspiring – and yes, I am doing something about it; there is a new piece in reds and oranges now under way, non pictorial in just those colours.  It’s very red, and I’m off upstairs to work more on it right now.

Signs that the beach is constantly undergoing change- these are tracks of water and wind activity

Although the beach cleaner hadn’t been along there was little rubbish contrary to my expectations; but despite plenty of insect repellent the little black flies were really annoying.  And, a couple of serious offerings right down near the edge of the last high tide mark, which was low on the beach – I wonder do the supplicants keep an eye on the tide statistics and times, etc ? 

Two interesting offerings this morning - the lower left is one, two white doves, the other three are all of the same offering. The terracotta pot was somethng different - containing feathers and water and ?...I didn't explore further, would have had to use my hand ;-o

Many years ago after recognising this weak link in the ideas chain, my son gave me for christmas or my birthday – they’re the same week – a fabric covered blank paged book about A4 size, urging me to keep my design ideas in it.  I have fairly consistently done so and now  it’s about 2/3 used, always in pencil so I can erase if necessary, which I don’t often do, as I think ideas should stand even if they aren’t quite ‘right’ in their form.  Occasionally I look back, finding the original ideas that led to particular quilts that sometimes I didn’t visualise as such at the time; so for example for each time I have been in Quilt National I can find the germs of those ideas there though the quilt doesn’t look like the original pencil ‘sketch’.   There are ideas I didn’t use at the time I noted them, but what I have diagrammed and written is enough to build on later.   Sometimes I go back and write a note on a page/diagram like ”this led to Mission Beach , april 1995″   

Anyway, I thought I’d share something of the early design process as I know it, with these  two unrelated pages being fairly typical:

Hmm - it's been a while - this page goes back over 4 years.... and perhaps I didn't make quite enough notation to help me remember what the heck I was thinking about when I made these jottings! However, I did do them and one small piece did come from part of this page, and I think there are interesting ideas whether they bring back what was originally on my mind, or not! They're sort of short hand I understand. Diagrams and lists.

This work doesn't actually exist, but the notes are part of the shorthand about a lot of my recent work. My textile art is often designed on a grid base - that structure common to tradtional and non-traditional quiltanking, the zone if you like that I like to explore. My materieals are often anything but traditional - for example the Tracks series.

In another post some time I’ll relate a couple of diagrams to actual works, such as “Ora Banda” and ”Mission Beach”  I’ll posssibly even show you the one wonderful drawing that I just cannot work out how on earth to put together!  I’m pretty good with piecing, even if I do say so myself – a line in my design book  is a seam waiting to happen - but this one has defeated me.  Stay tuned.

Shortly after sunrise this morning, at around 7am, the beach was beautiful.  The tide was way out and just turning as I walked eastwards into the early morning sun; there was  only a handful of people from one end to the other; and very little rubbish abandoned  by yesterday’s and last night’s visitors.

Jelly fish are ‘in season’ these past few days UL and LR, someone’s diggings UR were about to be inundated and wiped away;  something large lifted a large jellyfish LR to leave the print of its underside in the path of the incoming tide.  Very few tracks are permanent  – or is the opposite true?  Now that I’ve written that, I’m not sure it is …. but anyway the big gulls breakfasting on this fresh barracouta or similar fish LL waited patiently nearby for me to pass, and will have picked the bones clean by now if the incoming tide and other people walking along the beach didn’t defeat them!

I’m glad I had my camera.  The water was relatively calm and so clear, that as the tide turned  over the shallow sand their intersecting patterns could be clearly seen in the early morning sun.