My regular readers know my familiarity with basic landforms and structures, and my questions are easily answered by the in-house geologist here 🙂

I showed in recent a post how this work was inspired by rock strata, and showing how I’m representing the lines, shapes and colour of a formation featuring a normal fault using the particular techniques I’m favouring at present. It’s nearly finished and pretty much only the edge treatment needs to be done once I decide which technique to use for it. Options are a very fine binding in black or a facing.

Pieced fabric strips chosen for their earthy colours were fused to the black fabric, and linear patterns of stitching added to convey the impression of a layered, sedimentary rock formation split by earth forces into sections that over time were forced to gradually move along the faultline in opposite directions – standard textbook stuff, and in that post are links to images of some striking actual examples.

‘Strata’ seems a fairly popular starting point for fibre art design, and looking around I came across a website for an artist Caroline Burton with art inspired by geology , and of course, to anyone who works with fabric strips, those images of layered rock sturctures are bound to suggest using fabric strips in some way. I myself made a smallish piece with that title twenty years ago:

Checking some of my pins on Pinterest today, I was a bit startled to find an image I recently pinned of some cliffs along the UK coast that looks incredibly like the piece I’m working on right now. In fact I hadn’t seen the photo until the work was well under way, but I find it interesting to realise exactly why it was so appealing to me. Obviously that includes the lines and shapes, but equally important are the colours, which I carefully chose for their earthy quality, thinking particularly of some emblematic Australian Outback landscapes that I’ve lived and travelled in that are forever burned on my consciousness. But of course rocks anywhere can be in those colours – they’re not uniquely Australian. If you’re interested to see how uncanny this likness is, do go to the photographer’s website https://www.robertharding.com/preview/847-179/sandstone-rock-strata-waterfalls-sandymouth-beach-sunset-near/ Although I admire Robert ‘s beautiful photos, and I’d love to put that one up here for comparison, it would cost me over US$30 to do that, and my pocket just isn’t that deep! You could purchase a print from him but even better would be to purchase my unique wall quilt, which I’m very close to finishing, with just another hour or so of quilting, and as I said, just finish off the edge. Easier said than done sometimes, as either method requires care.

I have been making and exhibiting fibre art for nearly five decades, and very early on someone advised me to always get photos taken of my art for the record. As cameras become smaller in size the resolution in pixels became greater, and today a tiny camera is a vital component of our smart phones. Sometimes, “looking back” over my work feels like something of an archeological dig, speaking digitally.

A couple of days ago I was looking though an external hard drive that has lots of old stuff saved on it, and lots were listed as ‘old pics #’ I opened these and found some very old pics indeed, many of them of our young family in the 70’s and early 80s. There were some early works, too – and then this sample came up. There’s no detail but it feels like something I think I might have done, and certainly something I could have thought of doing. It has several features that I really like, and if I made this, I forgot to follow up the potential of the dark threads that seem laid or possibly machined beneath the surface. The little squares, though, seem to be tied down, and I don’t remember doing that. The outer edges of layers of sheer fabrics are torn I think, which also casts some doubt in my mind. Never mind, if someone comes forward to claim it as theirs, I’ll give way on it.

I never throw samples away, and it’s not in my samples bag here. So there’s an additional complication – if it is mine I must have made it in Perth Western Australia and left it there in my sewing room stuff, which is still safely in storage, so I can’t check that theory.

This next one is unmistakably mine, but date and whereabouts are uncertain. I think it must be in a cupboard here in Montevideo, probably because I remember being vaguely disappointed with its impact, and never felt it needed to be entered somewhere, so it sank from view.

From the colours and style I’m placing it in 2013. One day when I have the urge to tidy out certain cupboards, it will probably emerge from hiding, and then I’ll measure it properly. The date’s probably on it beside my signature. Back then we had been travelling and I was in a lot of trouble healthwise which led to hip replacement surgery. So there was quite a long period in 2012-14 in which I made little or no art, and I now realise I didn’t tidy the record after my recovery. I now quite like it, and will mount a search soon, perhaps in the quiet over Easter, because from the proportions and without knowing the actual measurements, it could have been sized to hang on the wall in our dining area, like these two:

I’ve rotated these about half-yearly for some time, but now feel we need something new and different.

I’ve made quite a number of art quilts using this basic idea of landscapey shapes against a background, literally diagrams in fabric and thread. This one is probably the one with the most pronounced, expressive lines echoing landscape:

While I adore freehand cutting and piecing seam by seam, aka improvisational patchwork, as in this and quite a few others in this series, I also occasionally use other techniques to visit this topic of landscape shapes resulting from the constant action of the major forces of nature that work on the Earth’s crust. The forces of wind, water and extreme temperatures actively engage in never ending cycles of erosion and deposition on every surface in the Earth’s crust.

With this and the ending of my previous post in mind, some titles I’m considering for my surrent project include ‘Cliff’, ‘Fracture’, ‘Strata 2’, ‘Landlines’ and ‘Rockface’. However ‘Timetracks 19′ is a distinct possibilty, too, because the statement for that series reads: ‘Nothing stays the same for ever.  Every landscape, man made object and living thing undergoes transformation due to decay, rapid or slow, through processes of change we know as erosion, wear and tear or aging.  These observable changes that occur I consider to be ‘timetracks’. I’m not sure why I haven’t used that title in quite a while…