Posts Tagged ‘sand tracks’

Natural and Man Made Tracks

Friday, September 28th, 2018

I remember taking this wonderful pic of many Man-made tracks criss-crossing the foreground in the Egyptian Black Desert  SSW of Cairo over 10 years ago.  Other timetracks, the worn down mountains surrounded by the fine sand deserts have been shaped principally by wind erosion.

The human bootprint I cropped out of this lovely pic would have told you these are very tiny little ‘cliffs’ in fine sand, photographed on our local beach just a few metres above the edge of the outgoing tide.  So, this time the erosional force is water, also indicated by the fine pattern of wiggly lines which are tracks of tiny little bivalves that burrow into the wet sand as the tide retreats.  I always feel I’d like to do something with the lines on this surface – well, make that something more – although this next image is a quilt,  New Directions, made many years before I saw the  pattern on the beach.

In “New Directions” (each square 12cm) the lines and arrows represent people coming to our ancient continent from all directions over its entire  human history.  The black/tan signifies the original immigrants, the Aboriginal people, who crossed the land bridges from Asia, at least 60,000 years ago.

 

Tracks And Marks

Wednesday, September 12th, 2018

 

 

Almost no one currently alive will ever find themselves in a landscape of any kind where they could be 100% sure no human has ever been, although on a deserted beach or a windswept landscape stretching into the distance, if you ignore the sometimes subtle tracks ahead, squint your eyes and forget your recent flight, bus, train hike, bike or boat trip that got you there, it may just be possible to imagine you are the first human to ever set foot on that landscape …

Though it took me years to actually name a group of works ‘Tracks’, I know that landscape shapes, colours and textures are all track marks left by Mother Nature on those surfaces.  Modern Man, too, has left many complicated marks – fences, pipelines, railways, roads, power lines, canals, airports and ports, marshalling yards, to say nothing of small towns and vast cities with horizontal mazes of streets, bridges and roads, and multilevel vertical mazes of human habitation –  really, the tracks of human activity are everywhere.  Though I have focused more on the patterning on artifacts and drawn images on rocks, cliffs, cave walls and open plains, the ‘tracks’ made by Man on landscapes are not limited to the ancient ones that I’ve always found so awe inspiring, intriguing as those are.

In the design of my quilt, New Directions, 2000, the multitude of lines from every direction represent the paths and tracks of human migration onto our continent in the last 60,000 years.  I have just read Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu  which details the agricultural practices of Australia’s indigenous Aboriginal people.  Until now, having grown up in Tasmania, and lived overseas for many years, I’d never heard of extensive fish traps on the great inland river systems, and the extensive areas planted with grains on the open plains, many of which were seen by the colonists but dismissed by settlers and farmers with European farming practice backgrounds.  Ignorant of the sustainable land management practices the indigenous people had practised for thousands of years, they dismissively assumed they were not civilised enough to have devised such systems.  This fascinating book has me thinking more about tracks and pathways.

Texture On The Beach

Friday, February 14th, 2014

20131215_080645 copy

This morning as I was hunting for something totally different, I came across this pattern in the ‘Sand Patterns’ file I hadn’t looked at for a while, and wondered how on earth I could have forgotten about this stunning pic?  It’s not the Namib Desert from the air or something like that – it’s in the wet sand not far above the low tide line.  I normally take care to avoid including shoe prints in my pics of sand patterns, but they do provide a perspective, and in this case there is a faint shoeprint just above the LLH corner of the pic.   When I took it a couple of months back, I didn’t check to see which little creatures made those little lumps at the ends of those lines -and I’m just presuming either tiny molluscs or bivalves, but they may be little crabs, though I rarely see any crabs at all on the beach I usually go to.

inspirations

And these photos show what was behind the Tidelines group of quilts in the Golden Textures exhibition last year – in the upper RH panel of the collage is ‘Tidelines 10’

Sandlace – Free Form Lace Continued

Thursday, November 21st, 2013

sandlace sample 1

 

Some sample making continues for some ‘Sandlace’ works,  inspired by pics such as this one above.

  • Something I’ll do more is place one of the ‘lacey’ sections over some of my own freeform piecing/patchwork.
  • Another possibility is ditto over some much more muted fabrics,  closer to each other in colour and intensity.
  • Also to be explored are some texture printed backgrounds ….

 

sand lace 3 web

sandlace3 detail

  •  I very much like raw edges, so this  is being explored, too.

 

 

Sandlace – First Samples

Tuesday, November 12th, 2013

sandlace sample 1

Well, although I could go on for a long time in PSE, drawing lines on photos of sand ripples to explore the idea of holes making a lace pattern based on the brights and darks, once I began to think of it as ‘sandlace’,  it seemed time to pick up needle and thread and start working with the idea !!

My first sample, the grey and cream in the upper right corner, below, was of the cream, bonded on one side, holes cut out and the edge shaped, then ironed on to the grey background.  Although I did a little stitching, and I liked it, it also seemed too flat, too ‘neat and careful’, I felt.

sandlace 5_samples

The grey and brown on the left is also heat bonded, and really, the small cut-outs feel too small to do much about – so I am just leaving that as is.  Which is what making samples is all about – its certainly not about finishing anything off, unless you specially want to, of course.

The third sample I did was cream, sewn to grey and then cut out after the orange stitches, which worked well – can you tell I’m keen on the florescent thread?  And, the dark grey stitching is actually attaching the whole thing to one of those painted stretched canvases I have around, its 20cm sq. – and I have several 30cm sq, so I will mount them as I do them, because that worked well, too.  On larger pieces there will be room for several French knots or other textural stitches if I want them.

 

 

 

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