A few years ago I developed a power point presentation for a lecture to a textile group about my textile art, and how it developed with inspirations and influences from the Earth’s surface.   About 70 carefully chosen slides of the quilted and embroidered textile art I’ve been making much of my adult life are in this presentation, A Journey Through Landscape,  and this image (Sunburnt Textures) graced the title page slide:I studied undergraduate geography and some geomorphology, and as a result of marriage to an exploration geologist, I have travelled through, lived in and on a variety of landscapes on several continents.  Colours and textures, shapes and processes of landscape formation all provide inspiration to my designs.   As an adult my personal interests have expanded to include the history I eschewed as a child, and include anthropology, primitive art forms and ancient history.

Looking at the fabric and thread part of my art, I can say that various kinds of embroidery were done by the women in our family, so I began to embroider and stitch decoration on things at a young age.  I came to patchwork later, in my 40s, and though my brief affair with traditional geometric patchwork in the late 80s was an intense one,  and we parted amicably, it left me with several enduring marks I’d call influences rather than scars.   Lines and shapes the basis of cut and pieced fabric known as patchwork –  which is my favourite textile art technique from a wide range of other textile art skills.  As a result, then, I love compositions of line, shape and colour, and love compilations of repeated units known in traditional circles as ‘blocks’ that build up into an overall patchwork design.   I love hand and machine embroidery, and hand and machine quilting.  Well, quilting IS an embroidery technique, anyway.

So you may wonder where all this is  going.  I’ve been doing no actual making for several months while I was recovering from a surgery, and haven’t written in my blog, either: but I have been thinking about it all.  After ten years, I’ve decided it’s time for a major website re-vamp.  I will be altering what is shown and how it is presented.  I want newer work up front or on top however you think about that, with plenty of archives people can explore if they want.  To please those who want good close ups I’ll have some click-throughs for those details that my wonderful photographer Eduardo Baldizan captures so well.  With a wet and windy weekend ahead, I am keen to start work on the revision.

“Simpson Desert Sunset” is about 30cm x 20cm, a freeform bargello needlepoint, highlighted with masses of french knots, dates from approx 1979. The frame is not visible.

My longer term readers will remember that frequently I have posted pictures of offerings I’ve found principally on the beaches of Uruguay, but also encountered on a visit to Cuba.  Collections of fruit and vegetables, fresh flowers, grains, often coins and candles, and usually with some bird or animal sacrifice, commonly chickens, roosters or doves and sometimes goat limbs or heads.  It has been a while since my last offerings post, though, for reasons I’ll skip here.  I’ve occasionally seen them on roadsides and at traffic intersections, for years in my ignorance believing these were dumped rubbish.  Uruguayans do litter their streets terribly, but these are, well, now I realise, offerings, and whatever they are hoping for is better served by placement where many people will pass by, I’m told.

These offerings relate to the makumba belief system that prevails here, Brasil, Argentina and Paraguay in particular, but also across the Caribbean and other parts of latin America where African people were brought across the Atlantic as captive slaves in the C16-C19.  Links to some of those posts are here,  here and here .

Early last year some Aussie visitors were in port for the day on a cruise ship, and Mike and I took them on a whirlwind tour of Montevideo, concluding with lunch at the port just before their departure.  As we often do, we started with The Cerro – a high hill overlooking the port and city of Montevideo, on which was constructed a spanish fortress in the early 1800s.  I was not entirely surprised to find an offering tucked into forked branches of a tree on the side of the hill, overlooking the harbour and city beyond.  I wouldn’t have said it was a high traffic site, but it does have a view of water – which is another very auspicious factor, apparently.

Offerings in (left) forked tree branches and (right) street intersection

A few weeks ago we were taking some departing friends around a couple of parts of the city they’d never managed to visit in the years they lived here.  After The Cerro fortress we made our way to the northern side of the city where in the barrio of Cerrito de la Vittoria stands the huge magnificent church of the Cerrito de la Vittoria   Right in the middle of the intersection where two  of the surrounding streets meet, was an offering in a cardboard box, including dead chicken, fruit, vegetables, flowers, corn and other stuff.  Nothing had driven over it – such a thing is probably a common sight there.  We’ll be going up there again soon, so maybe there’ll be another.