The iconic British embroiderer Constance Howard once said in a workshop I had the fortune to attend – “If you make a mistake or don’t like it, don’t unpick what you’ve done, just sew something more over the top of it.” Sooo very liberating – imperfections – work around them! Muslim artists and craftsmen always deliberately place at least one, but more likely several, mistakes in every work in acknowledgement that only Allah himself can create something perfect. You might have to look carefully to see them, but they will be there, whether it’s the mosaic lined dome in a mosque or a few stitches out of place in a richly coloured, exquisitely patterned silk carpet.

This morning I visited the website of an artist, Marlene Huissoud, onr of whose images on Pinterest intrigued me, and clicked to visit the site it was published on. At first I thought I was seeing a huge hand stitched buttonhole work, such as the beautiful works by @lindzeanne . As it turned out though, this artist’s work is produced by a lot of repetitive, very intense hand drawn mark making patterns, using black marker pen. Some of her works I relate to particularly, as any kind of decorative stitching is mark making with needle and thread, and I adore repetitive patterns, too.

In the text with some of her images was this statement “The A3 format is used to canalize the density of these simple geometric forms that I reproduce automatically with a simple pen. The mistakes of the hand process take an important part in this failure of reproducing geometric prints.”

Somehow related to this is the number of times I’ve been stitching along, quite absorbed in my podcast or recorded book, and suddenly realised that regularity has crept back into my stitching. Quite often in each of these two works I had to unpick a few stitches and re-sew them unevenly as planned. (Yes, yes Constance, I know, I know ….)

(I provide direct links in my text where I think readers might like further information, and always welcome readers’ questions and comments in reply)

Late yesterday I had the good news that the mask I made was accepted for the exhibition “Enmascaradas”, of theatre masks that opens at the Teatro Solis, Montevideo on August 14th next, a quite illustrious venue.

The statement reads: “Human cultures around the world include large, hairy, mythical ape-like creatures like this Boogeyman. Among them are Bigfoot and several others in North America; the Yowie is Australian; the Yeti, from the Himalayas. China has Jenin; Singapore, the Ape Man. Often seen as threatening to careless or mischievous children, these figures represent the deepest fears all humans have about the unknown and the uncontrollable in their lives.”

And of course, donning a mask enables our true face to be hidden, so that to the viewer we can ‘become’ a different personality or assume a new identity, as in a stage theatrical perfomance or a bank robbery 😉

The exhibition of 300 masks I saw earlier this year at the MAPI museum here in Montevideo included an impressive number of truly sinister, threatening masks, and those in particular really inspired me to go by that route, rather than the glamorous, elegant gorgeous path, or someting like an animal disguise – though of course, what I did make could be interpreted as a dangerous, threatening animal, I guess.

“Spiryrogyra 3: In The Weeds” has been juried in to SAQA’s next virtual Gallery, “Drawn to Lines”, the link to which opens on this page on August 1st. While I never make anything especially for a themed virtual gallery exhibiton, I do like entering anything I already have made that’s suitable for virtual gallery calls, because the pieces themselves don’t need to travel, (at serious expense from here) and no matter where viewers are, they don’t need to travel any further than their computer to see it, either. And, plus, it’s available for purchase or entry elsewhere.

The statement reads: “Wispy and fine, the floating strands of blue green algae wave gently and seductively in the current below the surface, but form a disappointing, unattractive mass when lifted out of the water or deposited on the shore.”

This has been out of sight (and mind) for a while, and looking at it now with some wonderful comments from Instagram viewers ringing in my ears, I’m inspired to use these and some other stitching techniques for the 2.5m wide wall quilt I’ve decided to make for the diningroom wall. It will be landscapey, on a warm sandy colour, using the segmented patchwork strips in deserty colours, of which I have plenty left from the work “Displacement” 2024, that is actually in the currently accessible virtual gallery “Beneath The Surface”

A couple of posts back I blogged that a work, “Out of Order 3,” was accepted for the SAQA “AI: Artistic Interpretations” call for entries.

The rapid appearance, acceptance and desirability, indeed the allure of Artificial Intelligence is phenomenal, as is the amount of energy needing to be drawn by computers to use it. I’m not sure if this aspect will be touched on by any of the selected artists, but we’ll all have to wait until the exhibition opens in Baton Rouge LA in February next year to see all the works and their statements.

The prospectus for this SAQA Global Exhibition read, in part: AI: Artistic Interpretations unites the creativity of fiber artists from across the globe with the algorithms, data, and machine learning of Artificial Intelligence. This exhibition will showcase the boundless creativity that emerges when human artistry combines with the potential of technology. Use artificial intelligence as a tool in your artwork or express your response to it. Combining artistry and technology developed from human inputs, AI: Artistic Interpretations encourages artists to explore what they can make when blending AI generated material with their own creative styles, resulting in works of art inspired by, or responding to, artificial intelligence and digital media. Wall-hung, ceiling-hung, and 3D artwork are all acceptable.” Thus, artists had a fairly wide range of angles from which to approach this interesting topic in rendering their ideas in fabric and thread.

My own approach was to enter a work on which the grid of gold printed squares was clearly impacted by some major disruptive force, echoing the early computer generative artist Vera Molnar’s designs. In her algorithm she’d inserted a small amount of code that made the plotter print increasingly out of kilter linear squares, and by these generative designs she’s known as one of the pioneering artists of the 60s to use the computer as a tool in her art. One artist who announced her acceptance into this exhibition told how she’d used a program to insert heself into some well known digital meme (which my cultural gap re US media didn’t allow me to recognise) and I’m sure there will be some artists who gave AI an assignment to design something for them from some provided data. Each angle is a valid one to meet the entry criteria – as long as you see AI as just another tool which can be used various ways.

It was interesting therefore that on a related art quilt site in the last few days, there was a fairly heated discussion about one of Caryl Bryer Fallert-Gentry’s recent works, with the whirling shapes and bright colours that characterise her designs. I can’t find that discussion now, but there was a considerable number of people who felt that by using her computer to design the work, then sending that file off to a fabric printing company to print onto fabric and return it for her to then layer up and do her incredible machine quilting on, was all in some way ‘cheating’. Caryl has always been an absolute whizz at piecing, and her lessons in that are now freely available on line. She could have pieced the work, but chose to go the whole-cloth quilt route, for whatever reason, and the quilting was superb as ever. That discussion reminded me of a woman I met in the Arapahoe County Quilt guild I joined as a P&Q newbie in1988. Trudy Hughes’ methods of rotary cutting and machine piecing had revolutionised the craft of patchwork in the previous few years, and this woman commented with a slight sniff in her voice, that she always used her scissors to cut out the patches, and only hand stitched the shapes together. I don’t think she used the word ‘cheating’, but that is clearly what she thought.

Today there was a reminder from the newsletter editor of the SAQA Oceania region, about the current call for submissions to the “What’s Inside?” themed virtual exhibition. She suggested some of us might have some suitable oldy-but-goody pieces lurking in our portfolios, and as size and the date of manufacture weren’t important, I thought I should at least have a look, though I wasn’t really expecting to find anything suitable that I could write a fitting statement for and enter this call. The usual stipulations applied – (a) good quality photographs, with a mimum number of pixels on the longest side, and (b) a full image to show the entire work plus a small amount of neutral background, plus a detail image.

And top of my list is one of my first art quilts, “Distant Shores” (I won’t go into the story of my several ‘first’ art quilts here) I made it in 1985 (forty years ago!) and showed it as a wall quilt in my first solo fibreart exhibition, “Sunburnt Textures” in Perth, Western Australia,1987. Back then we still lived in Australia, and I self identified as a ‘Creative Embroiderer’. My documentation of that show is by 24mm slides, and the only image I have is a small scan of the full view slide, with most of the bound edges cropped; and I can’t access that slide to get a better modern scan. I was a bit disappointed, because I think it would be perfect, and I’d even written the statement for it before I discovered the slide was deficient, so I’m showing it all here:

I don’t have a detail image, but no matter. I can tell you I painted what I hope is obviously sand ripples onto undyed calico/muslin; and in the dark areas I quilted and stitched lot of french knots. The shell is hand painted satin, constructed in two stuffed and quilted pieces, with the space showing a painted and stitched beach scene ‘inside’ the shell. The edges are finished with a ~1cm binding (some visible near the top right corner of the image.)

My statement reads – “We’ve all held a large shell close to our ear and ‘heard’ the sound of waves breaking on a distant beach; but what if we could look into that big shell and ‘see’ that distant beach?”

I did however find a couple of other, much more recent smallworks to enter, and whether either of them make the cut for that virtual exhibition, or not, I’ll post the link to that here in a few weeks’ time.