I’ve recently been considering the terms inspiration and influence, raised recently on a FB page I follow. They are not the same at all, and eventually the terms derivative and copying need to be considered in this context too, but I’ll think more about those and might come back to them later, or not.
Two important influences in my art are
(1) the long background of the decorative art of embroidery which began in my childhood home and was strongly boosted by the creative embroidery movement in Australia in the late 70s.
(2) A brief time I spent learning construction of, and the culture around, the traditional American patchwork quilt when I relocated to USA in the late 80s. Many traditional American quilts are of course appliqued, a technique I knew as an embroiderer; but geometric piecing I knew nothing about, and had a great time learning. That field of textile art still influences my own so that grids are my design layout of choice. Grids have become symbolic because a regular one is a perfect metaphor for stability and normality, whereas an irregular or broken one suggests instability and disruption.
I’ve concluded that in my own art there are there are two principal sources of inspiration:
(1) I’ve had a lifelong interest in Landscape Landscape shapes and textures feature in my art as repeated units of abstract patterns in fabric, thread and other materials. Landscapes are marked and shaped by both violent events (earthquakes, Tsunamis, floods and volcanos) and gradual change (the actions of wind, water and temperature in cycles of erosion and deposition) In a Life, the passage through birth and maturity to death displays both major life events like marriage and medical events which can suddenly impose dramatic changes to a person’s body or life, but there are also smaller, gradual changes we barely notice, like skin wrinkling and greying hair.
Most of my landscape inspired works are named after a place I’ve visited or lived in, that connection being referred to in the work’s title or statement.
Recent inspiration comes from my concern with the growing disruptions to the agreements for rules-based order that since the mid C20 have provided relatively stable international networks or sets of rules governing how communities, nations and companies operate, cooperate and cooperate in areas of trade and finance, economic development, and all kinds of information sharing.
Around the world today populations, companies and governments are facing political, financial, technological and climate change pressures, and our familiar systems threaten to buckle into disorder and sometimes even chaos. My responses in stitch and texture are in this Out of Order series featuring elements placed within increasingly disrupted grids.
