It’s interesting to occasionally look back over the pages of this blog to see what I was writing about some years ago. The results vary, as sometimes I come upon an opinion I held but have since changed my mind on, but other times I’m amazed at how some strongly held opinions are still exactly the way they were back then. Occasionally I’ve found mention of something I meant to follow up on but didn’t, most often because I’d completely forgotten about it. At times trivial and other times significant, my blog’s an important record for me as the nearest thing I keep to an artist’s journal or diary.
I started blogging about 20+ years ago as a record of living as a-stranger-in-a foreign-land, combining travelogue jottings with fibre art elements. From what was probably its peak popularity about 15 years ago, blogging has given way to the presence of other social media such as Facebook, Instagram and TikTok. I still maintain mine, as over that time the artist diary function has become much more important; and heck, we don’t travel as much as we used to, anyway!
Today I picked a page at random and found it was published on March 27th, 2015. I read the other two posts for that month, and saw that each covered some aspect of Life and my fibreart with relevant links to where I am today. As a lot can change over a decade, I decided to start this occasional series.
On March 27th 2015, I wrote about a fairly phlosophical article on the late Australian writer journalist Clive Palmer musing on the importance of the memories and souvenirs we all gather over time. It’s particularly a Baby Boomer issue, and one that Mike and I currently face. He and a colleague came to Uruguay in the late 1990s with financial backing to explore for gold. Rather than pack up our Perth W.A house and move everything over here, or lease the house out, for a high risk venture which could have bombed or run out of funds before the year was up, we decided to leave it ready to walk back into, as it was, in the care of a live-in house sitter. Without going into details of that 20 year period, in 2019 we sold that house, tossed and donated a mountain of stuff, and put the rest into storage, planning to return the following year to find another house more suited to our older selves. However the Covid-19 pandemic arrived, and those contents including furniture, albums and shoe boxes of photos, books, mineral and other collections are all still in storage there. For various reasons including medical, our return was delayed, but we’ve since decided to remain in Uruguay. We could somehow divest ourselves of most of that stuff, but a small portion would be important enough to consider bringing over here. That whole thing is rather daunting, and part of me relates fully to what Clive Palmer said memories and souvenirs.
Another post https://www.alisonschwabe.com/weblog/?p=3039 recorded the significance of learning improvisational patchwork in 1993 which became my main construction technique until early 2020, when the Covid-19 pandemic’s arrival suddenly mandated heaps more time at home. I’ve always loved hand stitch, chiefly as embellishment; but thanks to the pandemic, the explorations I now had time for encouraged hand stitch to become perhaps the most technique in my textile art today.
In the third post that month , https://www.alisonschwabe.com/weblog/?p=3057 I wrote (with lots of pics) reviewing a lovely exhibition of Mexican crafts at a favourite museum here in Montevideo, which I’ve often mentioned – the Museum of Pre-Colombian and Indigenous Art Such exhibitions remind us how mass produced every day objects in our lives compete with similar traditional but much more costly craftsmen-made objects in every medium, including metal, wood, fibre, ceramic, leather, glass and more. Most countries today have dedicated formal and informal organisations whose mission is to research, preserve and pass on the knowledge of traditional crafts of their regions, before that knowledge disappears. Such exhibitions are part of this effort, and I love visiting them.
