We were recently in the city of Barcelona for a few days en route back to Australia – where we hit Perth in time to vote in the breathtakingly close election  that took weeks to decide absolutely.

We so enjoyed the city of Barcelona on the southern edge of the Mediterranean, an area that has been lived in by people since Paleolithic times – the history museum there is fabulous.  The food, the architecture, the museums we visited, the ambience – it was all great, we didn’t see everything we could have but well, you have to leave something to go back to, right?  I did paddle in the Med though.  Wandering down the Rambla that goes from the central plaza down to the coast, in one long zone there are lots of living street sculptures we enjoyed – here are a couple to give you a smile today:

… or any other art work for that matter.  In fact, until today, since I know I have some way with words, I had never considered ‘naming’ much of a problem really.  I realised too that I have always considered naming my art works an actual part of the whole process, from initial design idea to last stitch.  The naming process may be a pop-up , the-lightbulb’s-on kind of moment at anystage; I may make little memos to myself at various times to return later; or I may need to do some serious deliberation at the end, even if I have been vaguely thinking about it a while.   To do this, I write lists of words or pairs of words, get help from Roget’s Thesaurus of synonyms perhaps,  and develop a short list of 2-3 titles to try for size against the finished work.  It could take little bursts of activity over hours or several days- sleep on it, etc.  If I still can’t decide I might consult with DH, but by one of these means I do arrive at the final choice, name it by writing the title on the back of the work, and it’s done.

What brought these thoughts to mind is  that today a well known quilt artist, Nancy Cook, asked two or three thousand of her art quilting colleagues on two lists for their suggestions for a name for her most recent work, which she commented is an entry for Quilt National’11 (entries close in a week, she is running against the clock here!)    Occasionally people do this, giving us a blog link to check the piece out and give feedback.  I just had never seen someone openly looking for a title for a QN entry although probably it has been done often enough –  but usually who would know? 

I linked through to the image on her blog.  Nancy said this is not the exact one she was entering but (as many of us know she does work in beautiful series)  contains important elements of her actual entry.   Because of my strong view on this -my readers would expect no less ;-p   on principle I didn’t make any title suggestions, but sent her the possible naming approaches I outlined above – which were probably not new to her, and no doubt people have others.  That QN entry form can cause a bit of panic as we all know.  And, most likely, Nancy probably thought of a great name all by herself as soon as she put the call out.   

In my mind anyway, this raised the following issues:

1. If  she were to choose a title suggested by someone in the comment section of her blog, ie this is in a very public way, would it then mean she should include this person’s name on the entry form as a collaborator? 
2. Should the person who suggested the chosen title then expect some % of prize money the maker might be awarded ?

I emailed the kernels of this post to Nancy a few hours ago, before even thinking about blogging on this today – she thanked me for my coments in such a way that I feel sure she will not take this as any kind of personal attack.  So those of you getting up a head of steam to hit me with fiery riposts defending Nancy Cook and her work, please hold your fire, re-read my post and understand this post is not about Nancy and her work, it’s just an interesting entering issue I hadn’t considered before.

And good luck to fellow QN11 entrants!!! – mine’s  already there and processed, according to an acknowledgement email  yesterday.

Here in Perth Western Australia on the first visit for a year, I found this piece of my work had been hung on a wallof one of the bedrooms by the house sitters –  who are not here at present – they like to move things around, and must have found this one behind a door …. anyway I don’t think I have ever taken a photo of it, not recently anyway, and had pretty well forgotten it.   Now there are some design shortcomings, I am the first to acknowledge – it was a while ago!!!    hgowever, it represents a slice-through view of one of the many open cut gold mines in and around Kalgoorlie Western Australia.  It’s done in paint plus stitch – long stem stitches and some small very tiny stitches in thin thread right up on the horizon there representing trees and the odd mining headframe.   It was my (unsuccessful) entry in the City of Kalgoorlie Art Prize exhibition of that year, but I don’t recall exhibiting it after that. 

Apart from my pleasure at seeing it again, what I do think is interesting  is that it clearly and graphically shows my interest in and inspiration from man-altered landscape structures and textures.  Colourwise the Eastern Goldfields of Western Australia is generally clear strong blue skies over red-brown rocks and soil – all in all typical of Outback Australia.  My interpretive, creative embroideries of the time often included paint+stitch.  The lines though, also have since and for a long time appeared in my quilted textile art.  Pardon a pun here, but there’s a line of continuity  between my early works and recent work.  I just thought some might be interested!

And apart from the amazingly close national election from which almost 2 weeks later a clear winner has not yet emerged, and may not; it has been a joy to listen to Australian voices all around.   The other day I overheard a gaggle of women (my husband would say ‘old chooks’ )  chatting over coffee in the morning sun.  Referring to the offsprings of  who knows – grandkids perhaps – one of them said to the others “… they all managed to have one of each, so they got their bookends”    Good grief !!!!  A foreign visitor would probably not realise this puzzling expression means  parents who produced a boy and a girl – “bookends” – often also referred to as  ‘the pigeon pair’.   I nearly choked on my coffee and it kept me smiling all day.