My last solo exhibition here was in 2009, which I can hardly believe, but tempus fugit, and for still another decade my art was freehand patchwork (now widely termed ‘improvisational’) and nearly entirely machine quilted. Having both shoulder joints replaced was one reason I moved away from machine quilting, but my long love of hand stitch goes back to the 80s, and I was pleased to watch it become increasingly popular after about 2012. My quilting workshops always include ideas for hand quilting that brings visible decorative stitch into play as a surface pattern over and above the texture from functional quilting. Below is a quilt from that time – it’s entirely machine quilted with wandering lines.
I am so grateful for today’s digital technology through which the internet apps like Facebook, Pinterest and Instagram et al, and artists’ own websites, give instant access to the work of many fibreartists around the world. Plus, I can look back fifty years to compare that time with today. Because of Mike’s work we lived for nearly two decades in remote, isolated areas (Kalgoorlie, Darwin, Katherine, Mt.Isa) and while they all had lively arts communities, each was a small world, and most of us had only occasional access to real time exhibitions in ‘the Big Smoke’. To get an idea of what was happening, who was being inspired by what to create their fibreart, we all depended on exhibition catalogues, books, subscription magazines, and whatever could be obtained through town libraries, and visiting workshop teachers were always a welcome treat.
Since medieval times, all the broad craft categories were backed by guilds of qualified master crafstmen, so there were spinners, weavers, lacemakers, dyers, metal workers, carpenters, potters, wood carvers, woodworkers, stone masons, and many more craft guilds. Most of those crafts were carried out on domestic/nonprofessional levels too, of course, and when I began stitching, ‘the crafts’ were still separated out like this, both in perception and reality. The whole process was considered to be making ‘craft’ anyway, as it was mostly from domestic settings and with a utility purpose. Mum smocked little dresses for us, made very fine crocheted table mats and runners for the antique dining table, and worked canvas needlepoint designs for framing, one of which was mounted as a panel on a firescreen produced by Dad’s best mate, Uncle Bill, who was a furniture manufacturer. Needlework, knitting, lacemaking and crochet skills were principally handed on down through parents and other female relatives, although I know in 1945 my newly married mother aged 20, attended evening classes at the local tech college to learn the basic home sewing and dressmaking which she hadn’t learned earlier largely due to the social disruption in WWII (she also attended cooking classes, and became excellent at both) People knitted or crocheted wool or other threads; others spun and wove wall hangings of wool or linen, people made baskets of plant fibre from stems and leaves; embroiderers decorated things with hand stitch (machine embroidery tended to be used for company logos and names on clothing, hotel and hospital linens, and similar) Quilters cut and pieced fabrics or appliqued pieces down to produce a surface design before quilting the layers, and either way, they were ‘quilters’. Most craft makers were and still are grouped or described by the techniques used, and we still join established guilds and clubs as well as informal groups based around those particular crafts. Even as I write this, in a few hours’ time I’ll be talking over Zoom with a group of stitchers who formed initially under the auspices of StitchClub, see link below. We ‘meet’ fortnightly, and though we’re scattered between UK, USA and Canada and Uruguay, we’re as close as any group I’ve ever belonged to, like the Over The Edge Quilters (Denver) or Goldfingers Embroiderers (Kalgoorlie WA) and the internet makes it all possible – yay!
Which brings me to Studio Art Quilt Associates, SAQA When I joined soon after it formed, the internet was still new, and promotional publicity comprised albums of slides sent out to galleries which SAQA hoped to interest in exhibitions of quilted 2D fibreart, fairly newly beng recognised as ‘art quilts’ about which the organisation has always worked to educate the public. For several years now, SAQA has included quilted 3D objects, too, and has a dedicated special interest group for members interested in making 3D works, Back in August I was invited to talk to that group about the 3D creations I’d occasionally made in my fibreart career. In 1978 I was fortunate to travel from Mt Isa down to Goolwa, south of Adelaide S.A. for a 9-day summer school, which was fabulous, and I can’t overstate how influential that experience continues to be. For example, I was introduced to soft sculpture. A 2020 StitchClub workshop with Clarissa Calleson really revived my interest in stuffed fabric forms including suffolk puffs, and in 2024 and 2025 I made some in my works selected for the first and second exhibitons of Glass+Textile here in UY.
So I’m currrently pursuing stuffed puffs, as discussed in recent posts here and here. Where this will lead I’m not sure, but several commitments are looming, so I’ll be giving them a rest until well into January, and who knows what could develop in that time?