Several Pleasant Surprises …

I’ve mentioned a couple of times before not being able to fully cross reference images that weren’t listed in my master list ‘catalogue’ – and vice versa. But this has turned out to be a bumper week for surprises.

First, when I emptied out the contents of a decaying plastic bag that had been literally sitting on a shelf undisturbed for years, and which I thought it held just a few offcuts and samples, I pulled out this little quilt I’d totally forgotten I ever made, and which I’d failed to enter on my master list:

Tidelines 13, 2012 80cm square. Whole cloth, stencilled, machine quilted. perhaps I should have ironed or steamed it before photographing, but this is literally how it was when I pulled it off the shelf!

and next I pulled out another two which I really thought were in storage in Australia, and that I don’t remember bringing over here!

Sunburnt Textures 3 1997, 70cmh x 100cmw Freehand cut, machine pieced and quilted in the ditch. Hand stitched.
Forgotten Title” was in a 1994 exhibition in Sydney, Australia. Improvisational patchwork, machine pieced and quilted.

But the biggest surprise of all was when I contacted Dianne Finnegan in Sydney who headed the selectors team for the Colours Of Australia 1994 exhibition, asking if she could tell me what I had called that piece above, and she sent back an image of a quilt I apparently called Bushfire Weather from the catalogue for Art Quilts of Australia 2000 that I really don’t remember making, but it undeniably has my signature all over it :-

“Bushfire Weather” 1999, 100cmh x 120cmw. Improvisational machine piecing, machine quilted with triple needle stitching. (catalogue page by Dianne Finnegan, and I’m still not sure who took the orignal image)

That clears up a bit of the confusion on that master list I referred to at the start of this post as I couldn’t find an image to go with that title – and most of my slides and records of entering shows, catalogues, etc are in my filing cabinet – all safely in storage. Stuff in storage is at times the bane of my existence – a long story I’ll not go into here. But I must have a slide somewhere there because we had to enter juried exhibitions by submitting 35mm slides until about 15 years ago. But for the moment, this will have to do for the record.

And, looking at it, I wonder how on earth I could have forgotten about it, and how I’ve no idea where it is, whether it sold or came back after the exhibibition…. So let me just say I really like this work and am so glad some record of its existence has been restored to me!!

The first paragraph statement is exactly as I would have written it today. The second paragraph is a nice little bio for the time.

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One Response to “Several Pleasant Surprises …”

  1. Felipe Maqueira says:

    Una vida entre telas registrada es una maravilla de orden dentro del caos que uno establece. Que te olvides, puede ser después de años de trabajo continuo y creando un estilo que te da la lucidez de reconocer esos hijos textiles.Bienvenidas las sorpresas que renuevan las dudas, o valorar lo que hemos creado. Aplaudo tu vida junto a tu obra.

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