In exactly 7 days from almost this minute, the SAQA Benefit Auction will open with Diamond Day on Friday, September 13 when any piece is available for $1,000; the first bidder wins…. and any piece you love can be bought any time for $1000, you don’t have to wait for its listing group to come up!

The rest of this reverse-price auction is divided into three sections, with a new section open each Monday:

Section 1: Sept 16 – Sept 22

Section 2: Sept 23 – Sept 29

Section 3: Sept 30 – Oct 6

Bidding online is open to anyone around the world – you do not need to be a SAQA member to bid in this auction! For bidding information go to www.saqa.com/auction All the works being offered can be seen at https://www.saqa.com/auctionview

Bid prices start at $750 per quilt and drop each day at 2pm EDT (GMT/UTC -4) until they reach $100 on Saturday. The following Monday, the bidding pattern repeats until the auction closes on October 6. Remaining pieces will be available in the SAQA Store.

Good luck – and I hope YOU might be adding to your collection of Alison Schwabe pieces, OR that you are about to become my newest collector !

I recently visited an artist’s website, www.naomimiddellman.com and in her statement found these words “…we assemble and disassemble our memories depending on who we are talking to and the context in which we remember things….a process in which we imagine, we tell stories, we construct and deconstruct in order to make sense of who we are.” In her art (also on her FB page) some memories have become handstitched landscapes, but their irregular edges suggest fleeting or ephemeral details.

With over seven decades of personal memories and many geographic relocations on three continents in my lifetime to draw on, I’m interested in how my creativity using fabric, thread and words has been influenced by my own memories. I googled around a bit and found this interesting resource on memory and art for students which I’ll spend some time exploring at more depth.

When we were young, we usually received books as birthday, Christmas and other occasional gifts, and we were encouraged to browse and read everything we found on the bookshelves in our family’s and grandparents’ homes. Particularly influential were the 7 volumes of Arthur Mee’s Children’s Encyclopedia (c.1920) with articles on all kinds of things and sets of pages of photos of, for example, rocks and minerals, or different native peoples from around the world, trees, of flowers, national flags, shells and so much more. Another very important book for me was Every Day Things For Lively Youngsters, one of a series in which the author, TJS Rowland, explained how simple things worked or happened. His works introduced young readers to the basics of Life including physics, chemistry, weather and through the workings of every day things in our lives. One article was about heating water to form steam, or cooling it to form ice. I can still remember the illustration explaining how wind blows humid air from the ocean over the land which cools as it rises to cross hills and mountains, making the water vapour condense and drop rain on the ground below. The illustrations were very diagrammatic, all in black/white with stick figure humans. I’ve just realised how important this book has been on my interests that continue from childhood to the present. It’s influenced how I express myself and have used my natural instinct to teach or demonstrate to others.

And talking of stick figures, a few months ago I discovered tadpole figures, and have been starting to think how to make them expressive without becoming complex:

I’ve always been fascinated by ancient history – and enjoy seeing reports of new archeological discoveries, bringing more understanding about Man’s distant past with information gleaned from patient study of cave and soil deposit records that demostrate Man’s interaction with the Earth’s surface from the earliest times right up to today.

And now that my own personal memories span 7+ decades, I have a strong sense of modern history, too. As a young child in the 40s I remember Australia still being part of The British Empire, of King George VI’s death meaning we had a queen, Queen Elizabeth II. That whole new reign changover kept me enthralled for a good 18 months. The Suez Crisis had a huge negative economic effect on the apple and pear production of our state as the bulk of the annual crops were exported to UK and Europe via the Suez Canal – the orchards were largely dug up and the government forced farmers into other production. Even as young as we were, we understood from the way the adults talked that this was very serious. Other big memories were the excitement of Sputnik1 the first satellite (Russian) launched into space; the erection of the Berlin Wall; The Cuban Missile Crisis; John Kennedy’s assassination Our own Prime Minister Harold Holt disappeared while swimming off a popular Victorian beach and such was the state of world tensions in the Cold War that some even speculated he was kidnapped by Russia. Those were the biggest events I reemember up to about the time I left school in the mid 60s. The rest of the late C20 and the first 24 years of this C21 are full of equally memorable events which today reach us instantly through modern communication technology. In my childhood though, news of remarkable history making events reached us first on the radio’s morning, midday or evening news. Next day we saw important pictures in the newspaper that was delivered to the house before breakfast. Weekly radio current affairs programs and printed magazines provided content and analysis. When we went to a movie ( “the pictures” ) it was always preceeded by a week-old Movietone newsreel, and it was not until I was 14 that we had black/white TV in Tasmania. For several years Mum only hired it for the school holidays, and when we returned to school, the TV set went back to the shop. Eventually the manager told Mum she’d virtually paid for it and for another $20 she could keep it, and it then became a permanent fixture in our house. The whole point of this exercise of course was to prevent us becoming obsessed TV-watching morons at the expense of our educations, but I doubt her determined strategy made the slightest difference to any of us 🙂

Reflecting on my portfolio of 40+ years, I can can see how memory is embedded everywhere in my art, and yet my fibreart has never become a pictorial narrative. Rather, it reveals my broad general view of my world through lines and patterns, primal shapes and sometimes specific colours in my compositions. So the influence of memory in what I produce won’t be immediately obvious to most. I contend that the very best statement an artist can give about a work is a brief, well chosen title as a starting point for a viewer’s personal interaction with it. However if an actual artist statement is really expected, I go for brevity:

The statement for this work reads – Irregular triangles out of alignment within a distorted grid are a statement of the current geopolitical state of the world, where widely accepted rules-based order has given way to chaos in which the risk of major regional wars breaking out seems more dangerous than it has been for decades. This disrupted grid is regular enough to suggest my optimism that relatively peaceful organisation may yet be restored. 

Below The Tideline – Artist Statement – I love glitter, and this call immediately told me ‘fibreglass’.  It was challenging to work with this slippery, shiny fabric so unlike the linen of my experience. I used beads from my collection, and the patterns emerged as I stitched.

I began writing another blog pickledgizzards.com several years ago to build a record for our kids of my own and their family life memories, including foody things, because food is such an important part of our memory.

This morning I took in three works to Eduardo’s studio to be photographed. This first detail is from a 1999 work I called Bushfire 4, 150cmh x 200cmw. I’ve always had good photography done of my fibreart, but this one was on a 35mm slide the original of which is in storage, and the scan isn’t totally clear, so I took it in while I was having another couple taken. It’s been tucked away in a cupboard for a few years, and when I took it out I was amazed at how much work I put into this, the sewing machine must have been running red hot! Contrary to my belief, and often stated claim, I discovered there’s not a single hand stitch apart from sewing down the binding folded over to the back… not even in any of the many ditch lines between the blocks, or the 6 segments/block, or along the seamlines of the several inserted strips/block! It’s all machine stitched and machine quilted, and is a very typical piece of that era.

In this next detail, a landscape inspired work about which I blogged during construction.

As I spread this work out to show Eduardo’s assistant Nestor, it struck me that the only machine stitching in this work was that which attached the binding to the front before being folded back and hand stitched into place.

In other words, between these two works there’s been a gradual move from 100% machine stitched to 100% hand stitched… and hand stitched surface designs are typical of my current work.

I feel that the fine strands of blue-green algae floating in a pond or waving gently in a slowly flowing stream are very fine ‘landscape lines’ – because they would not exist in linear form outside of their watery environment. Lift them out of the water and they’re just a dripping blob with almost no volume. If you’ve ever gathered some of these strands in your hand you know how very fine and very soft they are, rather like wet hair, but much more fragile.

I have quantities of some lovely blue, green and citric green fabrics, including some large pieces left from the bedspread I made for our bed made several years ago. Then there are some more of what I call offcuts, and then there are many little bits, scraps, which I always save, down to my cutoff point of about 1″sq. Such tiny snippets are just too small to sew, but I discard them with some reluctance, anyway.

This morning I hauled out the scrap bags, and began putting together groups of fabrics into strips to make a larger version of “Spirogyra”, my 2024 SAQA Auction quilt:

Instead of black, the background of this new work will be a dark pondy, greenish, brownish hard-to-define-colour. I love those murky colours which tend to take on an extra richness in response to the colours you place on them.

After my recent medical time-out, it’s taken a while to get my physical and mental self back into the routine of spending hours at a time in my workroom – and my physical routine needs further tweaking. This morning I put in a decent chunk of time first thing before going downstairs for a walk and some late breakfast. Tomorrow I’ll do the same, but plan for several hours in the afternoon, too. I’ve arranged for photography of two works to be done a week from tomorrow, one of which is a Quilt National 25 entry, but I’m planning a late run at another QN25 entry! If I find I just can’t finish this last minute wonder then there’s always something in the future for which it will be perfect ….

I’ve chosen the images below as examples of how the linear shapes of landscapes and provide me with the structure, or inspiration if you like, to compose pieced and stitched designs in fabric and thread. Many of them have words like landlines, landmarks, tidelines and dreamlines in their titles and statements.

In this favourite beach photo, I edited out a footprint, making the scale quite ambiguous, reminding us that whatever the scale, whether in a vast desert or along the margin of your local beach, such a pattern is formed in the process of erosion.

There are a couple of different land lines in this picture: first are what I call the beach cliffs which I’ve only seen occur 1m or 2m up the beach from the water’s edge a couple of times. In the lower part of the photo, the fine lines wandering down to the bottom of the photo ending with a little lump were ridges of wet sand left by tiny bivalves gradually following the receeding tide as it moved further away from the ‘beach cliffs’.

I used the photo to (1) draw basic lines of the beach cliffs and the pattern left by the little molluscs, and (2) used them to cut and piece a sample of improvisational or freehand patchwork to show students in a class how easy it is to work this way if one wishes, and that there is plenty of potential in original fibreart based on personal observations remembered, drawn or photographed.

In my advanced improvisational patchwork construction workshops, a power point presentation includes some other examples of how we can use patterns observed in nature.

I’ve written elsewhere about machine stitched lines and segments of fabric, and how they inspired me to come up with this almost-railway-tracks pattern.

This is a section of a new piece I’m currently working on in very deserty colours, using the same combination of machine and hand stitching with segmented patchwork that I developed and used in my donation to this year’s SAQA Benefit Auction quilt. The combination of lines and colours suggested strands of green algae, so I called it Spirogyra.