Here in Montevideo I don’t run a car, and to get about I have put in a few miles on buses and taxis; they’re usually good, only very occasionally shitty.  Most of the time though, the driver won’t lift a finger to help anyone  beyond arm’s reach of the car, unless you’re struggling with an obvious mobility aid  like stick or sporting an arm in sling.  At such times I’ve found they will go out of their normal way by parking right close up to the gate and even put grocery or other bags just inside said front gate as I’ve unlocked it.  Otherwise its pay the fare, get your stuff out ASAP and they pull off as soon as the door’s shut.

Turning into our street this morning, we passed a man walking along with a small hand cart – there are a couple of regulars who come through the neighbourhood to pick up bottles and other useful recyclables from the rubbish bin area down on the corner of the block, though I hadn’t seen this man before.  By the time I was exiting the taxi a few yards up the street from our gate, this man had drawn level on the other side of the street, and was loudly demanding pesos in a fairly hostile manner.  With my key in my hand I walked briskly to the gate and let myself in, then turned around and waved as the taxi driver wave out of his window and drove off, so he had waited to make sure I was safely inside, as I just felt he might have.  I had tipped him but now wished it had been a few pesos more!  I had flagged him on the street and taken no note of the company, car #  or his name  – and most Montevideo taxis are now white and reflective yellow like this one.    The man with the cart had moved on realising someone was literally watching my back.   Requests for money aren’t frequent, but for such moments I usually have a few pesos in my pockets or the outside area of my handbag, normally a shoulder bag worn diagonally, as I had this morning.

I really like the effect of the little dotty lined one on the right edge, but though done with a Sharpie pen, and ‘permanent’ such lines from these pens do bleed over time and also develop a sort of yellow stain around them on some fabrics.  This is to capture an idea only – more experimentation needed!

I’m sorry readers – somehow, by correcting the photo of my quilt which I discovered had become squashed down to something unrecognisable (I was looking for something else nearby) the correction has come up as a new post!  No matter, if you didn’t read it last year, it all bears repeating.  The point I make is not who first devised the improvisational method of piecing, though this is relevant, but, that taking a widely practised technique it is perfectly possible for two artists on different sides of the world to have the same idea and come up with something very similar.

“Bushfire 4”  1999,  150cm x 200cm

Scott Murkin, no information to hand at time of writing.

I put up these two quilts to make the point about which I wrote to a member of  Quiltart list this morning, which said in part:  “….you referred to ‘Scott Murkin’s technique’,  and I thought  “Hmmm, wonder what that is….”  (I don’t get the popular quilt magazines and books these days so its possible to be out of touch with the latest)  Anyway, it turns out it is freehand or improvisational piecing, anyway!  And when I went online to see images of Scott’s work, there was at least one quilt there that looked like an adaptation and re-arrangement of blocks from one of my own bushfire  quilts ”   – pictured above.  Of course, it isn’t a copy, its just that using similar colours and similar technique produces inevitably similar appearance

This is an update of post first published in 2016. The Bungle Bungles are one of Australia’s most iconic landforms, formed by millions of years’ water and wind erosion of a massive sedimentary sandstone deposit. By its very nature, that sandstone was once built up of material from earlier erosion by wind and water deposits adding to the bottom of an even more ancient sea. Geomporphological processes over unimaginablly long periods of time fascinate me, and the shaping of any landscape over time has become the perfect mataphor for a Life… just as as my own body shape, texture, and my views of the world have undergone nearly eight decades of shaping by the processes within my own lived and loved life 🙂

They are all in the same series but since I learned that purnululu means ‘sandstone’, the more recent ones have that title – as the aboriginal word is so much more elegant.

I’m happy to announce this recent work, Purnululu #7 has been accepted into SAQA’s  My Corner Of The World exhibition, opening in Ontario, Canada, May 21st next.  

It’s not the latest, but one of the more important ones of the Bungle Bungles series, and I’m pleased someone thought it as good a fit to this exhibition as I did.