Ticket to Munmalary 1997 130 cm x 150cm approx. (photographed against yellow background)
The idea behind this quilt is that as you ride along in a car, bus or train, out of the side of your eye there are moving glimpses of landscape changes as you whizz along. Topstitching on the strips and landscape segments was machine stitched in gold.
Songlines 1997, 50cm x 200cm approx. (not including the dark bit at the left side!)
The same idea, here, too, incorporating the wandering strips I was using a lot in those years – see the Colour Memory quilt gallery. These little landscape elements were various sizes but all more or less square, and framed in black machine stitchery. I don’t have detail views of these quilts with me here in UY.
Framing a landscapey element in machine stitch, then, is something I’ve often used before. In this case, small slices of gold lame stitched down with gold, overlaid with sheer nylon organza and then outlined in gold machine stitch. This sample from 2008 shows this has been something I go back to from time to time in presenting such elements. I didn’t have bonding web back then – and perhaps that’s why I didn’t pursue this in a larger piece.
And so we come to a new sample, one of the three pictured part-finished in the previous post. The landscape itself has been bonded onto the black background – then I did a lot of fiddling around with trying hand stitch in various colours, and finally settled on gold machine stitch detail… the fav. standby – and nothing wrong with that!
Small landscape, 2014, reference previous post. Area of design approx. 10xm square.
These little pieces are to be mounted individually on 20cm. sq canvas artist stretchers – the edge finish is still a little uncertain.
Perhaps gold machine stitch, perhaps hand stitch in gold. While I resolve this, its going to be a wet day tomorrow, and I will do some more.
I am currently working on a power point about my work, to use when speaking to an art quilt and fibre group in Perth WA in May – decided to really go into influences and developments in my work – and including lots of samples and relating them to things I did in the past and how they connect with my current work. I remember seeing a presentation, slide lecture c. 1992, by a US artist Patsy Allen, who went through her pre-quilt and quilted works, showing how all the elements in her work demonstrated consistent themes but how the importance and prominence of each in her work varied over time, but they were still there. Although I’d been making at quilts only a few years, with my background of creative embroidery and the fact that I’d always had photography done, I realized my art too already reflected such continuity, and it was eye opening and quite exciting to see that in my work, and of course I’ve both made more and travelled further since. Q – so did I begin to think more about what I was putting into my art, as a result of this lecture, or would I have begun to reflect and consider as I got older, anyway?
In the same vein, in the last week I responded to a call to supply an article with images connected to my having been in Quilt National – which so far I have, 1993, 1995, 2007, 2009. That’s quite a time span, and, reviewed in in context, it was very interesting to see how it fits in the timeline – I called it “A Journey Through Landscape”, its been accepted for publication on the website, and I’ll post the link when it goes live in the next couple of weeks. Perhaps that’s what I should call my powerpoint …
