A friend and I went along the coast a little to the beach where a great deal  is said to happen on Imianja’s birthday – and so it proved.  After midnight we spent an interesting hour plus, wandering among groups  large and small, on the sand, most of their participants costumed in roomy satin gear with head caps or tied bandannas mostly white, too.  A couple of also had figures dressed in yellow, red and blue, and I hope soon to talk with someone who can explain a significance I sensed and some of the things I am curious about.  My friend Sally commented how calm and  focused people were.  There was a lot of soft drum beating, and frequently tiny little bells ringing in  some kind of ritual over the boats that people had built and brought to the beach to be loaded with the goddess’ birthday gifts before being floated out to sea.  In addition to things I have often seen on the beach and written about – fruit, vegetables, pop corn, blue and white flowers, ribbons, beads, silvery glittery things, there were often mirrors ( she is known to be vain) small bottles of perfume,  meringues, and lots and lots of candles, blue or white.  Preparations we saw included honey being either added to the boat or poured over what had been placed in there.  We heard group members checking to make sure this and that item had been added – someone had definitely put in a small amount of money – in one of the boats I spied a cheap watch.  Wonder if it was going, and if it still is.   Most boats were made of styrofoam sheeting sealed with blue tape.  Some were elaborately edged and trimmed with tiny blue beads or fabric trim.  You can see some of these things in the photos I took for which the following is the link:

https://picasaweb.google.com/Alison.Schwabe/February2nd2012BirthdayOfSeaGoddessImianja?authuser=0&authkey=Gv1sRgCO_13qviudKTiAE&feat=directlink

So I got to bed after 1-30.  I woke and went down to the local Carrasco beach a few hours later, at 7am, and goodness, the beach was strewn with wreckage from the night’s activvity.  I can’t tell you how many dead chickens were spread out along the beach, most of them headless (we saw none anywhere on the other beach the night before)   No one in their right mind will go swimming in this bay for at least a week, maybe more, stomach churning!  I took photos of wreckage sites, and a disturbing thing was the amount of plastic – which of course includes the ubiquitous styrofoam.  I truly wish all plastic was rapidly biodegradable – there was a lot of it around.  I met a neighbour walking his dog and he made it clear how angry it all made him,  saying something like ‘it’s all phony anyway – this stuff belongs in brasil – they’re just stupidly copying it here.  I hate it’.  He has a point about the plastic, and the myriad of candles, but whether he’s correct about the validity of this, um, belief system, which has swelled in recent years, I’m not so sure. 

Anyway enjoy the photos.

Some new catalogues came in this morning’s mail.  One is  Portfolio #18,   (2011)  an art quilt source book published periodically by Studio Art Quilt Associates, SAQA,  in which images of quilted textile art by many of its Professional Artist Members, PAMs, are presented in categories of abstract, nature, figurative, colour work, landscape, representational and sculptural.  There’s some marvellous work in it, and I am proud to be there, too, (p 174)  with Ebb & Flow 17,  pictured below.  

Ebb & Flow 17, 178cm x 95cm, 2009

I don’t remember who it was several years back, while commenting on the current state of the art quilt world, ruffled quite a few feathers by saying that there were many art quilt makers who could just as easily or more effectively do in paint on canvas what they are presenting in fabric and thread, and perhaps more easily.   Of course artist’s canvas is a fabric too, but we don’t think of it in the same way as those fabrics we cut, sew, print, dye, pleat, burn, paint, rip, stitch  and do all other manner of things to in the name of making “art” quilts.  The ensuing fuss contained a lot emotionally charged comment such as how fabric is placed next to our skin right after our entry to this world and covers our bodies all our lives; therefore the tactile experience of fabric is innately familiar and important to humans, and that handling it as a raw material in making art caters to primordial emotional needs.   As I looked at some of those Portfolio #18 images I found myself wondering why fabric and thread had been used for some particular works, some of which indeed were more like paintings, seeming to me less related to their quilt heritage than their heritage of the art of painting.  Some of them are no doubt enhanced with some wonderful quilting, appropriately designed and well executed, an additional layer of texture like mantle over an already interesting image, and unfortunately for the technical enthusiasts there are no detail shots, but perhaps that is as unimportant as a close-up of a painting in which you can see the brush or knife strokes.  But it got me thinking, why did this and that artist do what they have done on fabric – and really, is the quilting that is on top of the image necessary, or could it have been left out? Or, to put it another way:  Would this work of art have had as much credibility (in the wider art world) as it appears to have in the art quilt world by virtue of being a layered and quilted textile presented as a wallhanging?  Sigh – some did not come up positive there. I felt a bit jaded.

Then I opened the Sightlines catalogue, another SAQA publication for an exhibition of installation works created especially for this exhibition by 14 selected PAMs, who in the words of curator Virginia Spiegel were described as “….artists … who were making art about Something.  Not necessarily momentous or earthshaking, but definitely artwork about something that motivated the artist to create artwork of the highest standards both in its materiality and it meaning.  We have all seen art that is gorgeous and technically brilliant, but so mindless and without depth that we do no more than glance at it and then glance away, disappointed.”     Concluding her curator’s statement, Virginia says:”Each of the artists has brought  to her Sightlines artwork knowledge, wit passion, maturity and a point of view. These artists are indeed telling stories about Something.”   This claim is especially true when one reads each artist’s own comments about their particular work and the motivation to produce it.  But without those statements, some stories were were less readable, less comprehensible than others.   

As often happens to me when I look at recent books, magazines or catalogues, I turn to yet another examination of my own rationale for making art in fabric and thread plus whichever of the above processes I’m using at the time.  On one hand fabric is just another medium like paper or canvas, using whatever additional materials, processes and tools that I select.    On the other, I find myself thinking yet again whether I am just making something “gorgeous and technically brilliant, but so mindless and without depth that we do no more than glance at it and then glance away, disappointed”?  I am confident (and modest too) of the technical qualities of what I make, but not always so sure that my story connects with the viewer in significant ways….does it have that elusive Something?

Both catalogues can be ordered online from www.saqa.com bookshop.  Within the next few months, ie the northern spring, the images of Portfolio #18 will also be accessible online from the SAQA website.

I was walking on the beach before 7am this mornning,  and so absorbed in the opening installment of “Island Beneath The Sea”  by Isabel Allende that I almost stepped on this tiny little offering; the smallest, simplest one I have ever noticed.  it was definitely an offering, as the candles were clearly pressed down into the wet sand as the water receded.  Yes, I know you can’t see two, but indeed there were, one slightly shorter and directly behind the other – duh – how could I take such a photo ?  Answer – I was absorbed in my book.  As they’ll be gone now, you’ll just have to take my word for it that there were two.

The wind was blowing rolls of foam in from an unusual direction, and the dog watched these very nervously as they slowly and majestically glided along in the final shallows before coming to rest on the sand.   I haven’t seen them like that before.  Couldn’t get a good snap of her wary nervousness which was rather funny – and as the tide receeded they left these interesting linear patterns I haven’t seen before, either:

When I first noticed these markings I thought that in the 3 weeks I’d been away some newly appeared creature must have begun being busy on the beach –  then realised it was foam which had gradually lost all the air bubbles and left these lovely patterns in linear groups down the beach behind the receeding water.  3-4 weeks is a long time in the  cycle of creatures and of the beach profile itself.  Today there were a couple of 5-7cm jellyfish on the sand – it’s only a month or 5 weeks since I blogged of seeing little 1-2cm sized ones.