The 2011 SAQA Benefit Art quilt Auction starts one week today – Monday September 12th at 2-00pm , Eastern Time USA – adjust for your local equivalent time to be quick off the mark.  It is an online auction, in reverse, so they come up on day 1 at the top price payable, (in this case $750) and every day at 2-00pm Eastern the price of those unsold drops, so they become more affordable but of course, more hotly contested !

For this annual auction, over 300 small wall quilts sized around 10″ to 12″ square, were contributed by SAQA members.  Every one is an original design.  Some of the makers are well known, and others not so – and in style and theme there’s something for everyone.  Some of them will be framed by their buyers, but all have been submitted ready to hang on the wall.   Mine is pictured below, and can be found on page 2a, 4th row down – this means it will be auctioned in the second auction week – the week beginning 19th september.

I don’t know why this little one never received a title – it is in the Timetracks series really, and I guess should be #21 but it never received it, and is listed as Untitled.  I’ll mentally allocate that number, and the next Timetracks I do, which is coming up in a rush right now, will be #22. 

 Anyway, if you are interested in collecting, go to SAQA where you will find this year’s quilts pictured on 6 pages.  Detailed instructions about how the auction operates are there.  Each  image can be clicked  to take you through to more information about the makers and their own websites.  New this year is the display of several small collections of images that have been grouped by volunteer curators who see a common theme in the quilts they selected.  These are very interesting – and I wonder if anyone will be prompted to try to collect a whole group?  Several pieces appear in more than one collection, interestingly, a sign of broad appeal, perhaps.

A  few weeks ago I posted  group of small landscape works from 2000,  mounted on woven newspaper mats which seemed like a good idea at the time.   A while back I dug them out to give me something of  a starting point in a small pieced works direction to which I feel increasingly drawn.

These fit a 20cm x 20cm art stretcher. 

I love pieced work, where areas of different coloured and textured fabrics are joined by stitch to form a new fabric surface pattern.  Call it patchwork if you will, which it technically is;  however I think to most people the term ‘patchwork’  has connotations of templates,  traditional patterns and precise geometric shapes.  The ultra fine lines in pieced work  by Margery Goodall several years ago alerted me to technical potential that I had not explored in my own work (and since developed in my Ebb & Flow series)  Recent improvisational pieced works of Lisa Call and Erin Wilson have reminded me of the potential of ‘lines’.

I bought these delicate little fibre works in Chile several years ago, each is approx 3″ x 3″.  I had often seen them at the airport when passing through Santiago, but I found these  at a market in southern Chile, Puerto Montt probably, I don’t fully remember.  I’ve given a few away, and although I have been meaning to wear one sometime, perhaps because I knew nothing about them I felt hesitant about wearing one. 

Well this morning several things came together.  I have no idea where it started, but at one point I found myself exploring the work of ricardo pulgar whose mission is to combine traditional crafts from his region with other materials in a contemporary way, his focus being sculpture and jewellery.  In the gallery sections (especially horsehair)  on this particular site scroll down and you will come across several pieces of jewellery incorporating crin plus silver and other materials.

I thik it is fascinating how modern makers are linking materials and techniques to each other that a decade or two ago would never been put anywhere near each other.  Just as in cuisine, so in artesanias/handcrafts  – even quilted textiles – and quite often somewhere in all that is some ‘art’.