The recent surprise unearthing of the above work, Songlines of the 4WDrovers, featuring wandering lines, strips of fabric connecting the double sided panels featuring images of landscapes and roads, inevitably led to comparing it with some contemporaneous 2D works, and revealed the importance of what I’ve always described as ‘wandering strips’ in my quilts c.1993 to early 2010: all these strips represent movement, relocation and travel, by road, rail or air. That is, they all represent change.
I’ve mentioned before that because of Mike’s profession as an exloration geologist, in the first two decade of our married life, we fairly often pulled up stakes and moved to different Australian Outback mining centres. In late 1987 we moved to Denver USA, and once there I came under the spell of traditional American geometric patchwork and quilting, particularly those with the characterisitic grid layouts of repeated geometric designs or motifs. In 1990 I took a workshop from Nancy Crow, in which a student asked her to show her how to insert the wonderfully precise 1/2inch strips Nancy included in some of her early, very complex quilts. As I worked on whatever the class exercises were, I was listening to the brief little demo taking place nearby. I’m a good listener, and took in enough to successfully work out at home what I’d been hearing from Nancy’s demo: using the ruler, cut the background fabric where you want the strip to go; cut a 1″strip, and using 1/4″ seam allowances, sew the strip into the base fabric background. I don’t recall where I got the idea to cross some strips, but I did know to cut the base fabric larger to allow for strips to exactly cross, and once they were sewn in, trim the background/base fabric to the desired final size.
By this time, a mental association of colours with particular places in my past had become another signature element, and I was giving quilts titles that reflected those. In another Nancy Crow workshop she showed us how to freehand cut and piece curved fabric shapes, in what is today known as ‘improvisational piecing’. This was a wonderful addition to the skills I found important in the many landscape quilts that followed, and it became one of my signature style elements in much of what I did until the early 2000s:
Then other ways of showing landscapes and tracks or paths gradually developed – in the whole ‘Tracks’ series, paths and tracks also came to include the results of erosion processes, the marks made on the Earth’s and other surfaces over time…
In the last few years, there has been further change in my art, which I’d loosely describe as “grids with stitch textured units”, and they’ll be the subject of another post sometime soon.
Tags: lines, songlines, symbols of change, Wandering lines