Posts Tagged ‘Dreamtracks’

Segmented Designs 2

Sunday, May 15th, 2016

Experimenting with little bits of metallic leather applied with metallic stitchery met the requirements of the SAQA auction. It arrived safely. Mosaic quilt blog

Mosaic Pathway, 2016.  12″ x 12″    SAQA Online Auction 2016.


With the silver mylar stuff  I mentioned last post, I’ve since begun a reasonably large piece, 90cm x 120cm   It is feather light, compared to what something similar using leather, obviously!    One thing about this stuff is, that when ironed from the wrong side after being attached, the cut edges pleasingly sort of round off, as if trying to turn under, which gives a nice smooth finish which you may be able to pick out on the sample on the very left side of the collage below –

Mosaic design silver pathway blog.

If it all turns out satisfactorily in accordance with how it’s going so far, I could enter it in Quilt National, so that’s probably the last you’ll see of any of it until it’s exhibited somewhere.

The Tighter The Curve The Trickier …

Wednesday, September 2nd, 2015

The Bungle Bungles series moves along.  I’ve started another one this week, to be 2.25m x approx 1m, destined for a particular wall in our house, which currently features either Ebb&Flow 15 or Timetracks 15 , which I rotate every couple of months.

If you’ve been following my posts you’ll know that this series involves a lot of setting curved shapes into background fabric.  This early one, called ‘Dreamtracks’ is a good example – the shapes are very small; when you consider this is a 30 cm square quilt, those patches are about 2cm – 4cm across.   Actually I don’t think quilted things this small deserve the moniker ‘quilt’, but this one is currently showing in a collection of 30cm quilts being seen in Australia, The Kimberley Dreaming Collection – I’m not sure where it is right now, but Dale Rollerson or Elizabeth Dubbelde will know 🙂

Dreamtracks Kimberley Dreaming entry copy blog

 

The smaller and tighter the curve, the more pins I need to keep the cut edges of the shapes together for sewing!  With the machine sewing very slowly, my right hand darts back and forth, pulling pins and pushing them into the pin cushion centimeters away, just out of the range of this photo.  Like a lot of  really improvisational piecing, it’s very painstaking, but worth it, imho; and made a bit easier with the machine located in a well constructed in the  sewing table by our friend Dennis, so that the machine bed is mol level with the table top.

the tighter the curve the trickier!

 

 

Linking in this post today to  http://ninamariesayre.blogspot.com/

Quilting Adds More Glitter

Wednesday, August 26th, 2015

Even with an interval of a couple of weeks and images taken by different cameras with different lighting, the same section of the work I’m almost finished quilting is comparable., and I’m thinking I like the totally smooth image on the left better than the other … nah, not going to undo it!  Now I’m going to add a couple of horizontal lines along the several bands of pain colour, bind and then it will be done.
BB 7 blog

Photographing Quilts In The New Series

Friday, July 31st, 2015

Kimberley Dreaming pieces collage blog 2

 

I’ve just set up a photography date next wednesday with my photographer here, Eduardo Baldizan, who has photographed all my work done here, and is great to work with.

Unusually  for me, the bindings and sleeves of three are already properly finished.  Many’s the time I’ve hastily basted these things in place at the last minute for photography – you can’t tell from the front, and I am by nature a bit of a last minute wonder.

And as usual, there’s the lure of a  last minute pressure buzz – I have several days to attempt the next one that I’ve been mulling over while I make # 6, and think I’ll make a dash for it, beginning in just a few minutes.  If its a wet weekend, as expected, I’ve got bags of time …  the entry deadline’s not for another week yet!

An Update on Motivations

Friday, July 17th, 2015

In the past day or so I followed another quiltmaker’s link to her blog about what she has been making recently – a site I’ve been to a number of times, and left a comment to the effect “I see what you’ve done, but what’s your motivation?”   Her response was that she didn’t think people would want to read about why she uses the materials and subject matter she does.  I really differ, and though I thought  her response a bit vague, with a principal rationale she gave as it being play, I appreciated her answering.  Yes,  I do like to read about what motivates people; after all, we all have different reasons for doing what we do, and, we could use other ways to express ourselves – painting, ceramics, writing a book or making movies, whatever. The artist in each of us is responding to a unique vision of the world around us.  Well that’s my view anyway – and I wrote back to her, in part –

The making, the sewing and assembling, is different for each of us, and leads to distinctive styles – but that is still different from the why behind it.  …. For myself, a lot of my work, including my Ebb & Flow quilts, or the works in my Tracks series (galleries on my website)  expresses what I see as a major theme in the world about me – that everything is in a process of change as long as your time scale is long enough – and that change over time brings people into and takes them out of our lives; change can affect health, wealth, geographical location, and of course we ourselves change through age and may even change emotionally as we move through time.  My vision is explored via abstract arrangements of lines, shapes and textures in fabric and thread; I don’t do anything pictorial/representational. Well my current series is as representational is it might get ….

Then I checked my own blog, and found it is a long time since I wrote about my own motivations!…. and if the above artist or any new reader was checking they might be wondering – so let me say a few words in general about all the textile art I have done –

For more than 30 years my original works have been inspired by landscape structures, processes and resulting patterning of textures.  Since childhood I have been fascinated by natural forces and the roles they play in shaping the landscape.  I studied geography and geomorphology at university. Since marrying a geologist in the late ’60’s, I’ve found myself living in a variety of different landscapes: coastal and Outback Australia, central western USA, littoral and urban Uruguay, all of which have influenced my work.   Regarding Landscape as a metaphor for Life is taking me in new directions.

I am currently exploring a landscape known as The Bungle Bungles or as the Aboriginal people have always called it, Purnululu.  It’s a large, deeply eroded sandstone and karst range in the Kimberley region of NW Australia.  In almost 20 years of Outback living, much of it up north, I still have not yet been there – but it is one of those iconic places Australians want to go, and I hope to one day. Iconic it may be, but it is also mysterious, and I wanted to use it as the subject of an art quilt competition I was entering at the time. I have become further intrigued with it and there are still several more ways I want to explore how I feel about this huge mass of rocks that stand arising out of plains like a group of sentinels.

While reading of the WA Government’s application document for the Bungle Bungles / Purnululu to go on the World Heritage List, I came across this comment by the writers –

“Religious beliefs, places of spiritual significance, stories and paintings
associating ancestral beings with the landscape, kinship connections and language
identification are all essential to the connection between people and place in Purnululu,
providing traditional owners then, as now, with a guide to living and being.”

This rather convoluted long sentence,  and other reading, have really focused my mind on this place, and at the moment I feel it could take me until the end of the year or beyond to exhaust the topic – a bit like a series of paintings on haystacks or waterlily ponds,  I guess.  While racking my brains for a suitable title, as I normally do I compiled a list of words I associate with my subject, and it includes these :-  age-old, timeworn, massif, massive,  keeper, emblematic, timeless, seasonal sculpture, silent, presence, overwhelming, mysterious …   And some titles I considered were/are Dreamtracks, Sentinels,  Ancient Keepers, Guardians.  The entry into the art competition that started all this I called ‘Dreamtracks’, and I may continue naming the series this with the addition of 2,3 etc., but I’m not sure if the one I am working on now will really be suited by this title, or not – I’ll wait and see when the quilting’s done.

BungleBungles 6

 

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