My quilt in the SAQA Benefit Auction, Spirogyra, sold in the middle of last week, and today I received notification that the buyer is a maker herself and a well known Californian collector, so I’m very pleased to have a piece in her collection at last. In thanking her for her support of SAQA, I wanted to give her some insight to the thinking and processes that led me to make the 12″ auction piece, way back in early February this year. (That’s a time I often find it convenient to do a couple of small projects while working in front of a cooling fan) That’s quite a while ago now, so I needed to look up a few blog posts and after thinking about it for a while, my email to her included the following comments:

Since I began freehand cutting and piecing in the early 90s, inserted strips or wandering lines, as I think of them, have long been part of my work.  These strips began signifying bits of memory, as a way of adding important colours into essentially landscape backgrounds, as I frequently associate places we’ve lived or travelled with particular colours.  My textile art background from waaaay back is interpretive or creative embroidery, and I have long felt that the most expressive stitch of all is that most basic one – the glorious straight stitch including the stemmed versions of other stitches like french knots and fly stitch.   These elements came together in 2020 with Pandemic Pattern  With plenty of time at home to follow ideas, and having always been a keen sample maker, I joined some scraps of fabric in earthy colours and trimmed them to segmented strips which I then couched/hand appliqued with gold thread, a work that became Bush Colours   It is really a landmark quilt, because many works featuring segmented lines have followed.  I love the whole process of piecing and raw edge stitching/couching of those lines.  Experimentation and sample making early this year led to making Spirogyra. Green is my favourite colour, and from that section of the colour wheel I have heaps of scraps and offcuts after making a bedspread several years ago. As these particular techniques are incredibly economical in fabric usage, I have enough to continue producing works featuring these colours for quite a while yet!  The links in this paragraph go to specific blog posts dealing with these works in detail.

Quite often small works such as those in SAQA’s annual Spotlight and Benefit Auctions or the Ozquilt biennial Australia Wide calls (40cm sq.) lead on to larger pieces, such as the one I’m now working on, with a working title of Spirogyra 2 –

Being larger gives scope for much more complexity and exploration of the depth created by weaving the strips over and under.

Quilting has started, and at the moment is fine traditional quilting along both edges of the segmented and the machine+hand sewn strips. The blank empty gaps will need to be quilted by something that retreats to the background. ie is less visible, in a darker colour and a fine texture, suggesting the watery medium of a pond or very slow river, in which strands of Spirogyra float.

In addition to my belief in the value of making samples, I also believe that in writing about my work and thinking a little deeper about certain aspects of it helps me understand the role of textile art in my creative life.

Last week I posted about how my thinking of how memory underlies all my own art. In my earliest fibre art which I referred to what I was doing then as ‘creative embroidery‘, and exhibited in my first solo show “Sunburnt Textures”. In thee works I was absorbed with textures of the earth’s surface and representing these in stitch.  Then came man-made markings and patterns Ancient Expressions, different environments Colour Memories and the processes of natural forces on all surfaces Timetracks. In my previous post I wrote of the influences that led to my group of Ebb&Flow quilts

In our long married life together, Mike and I have frequently moved from one place to another following the opportunities and demands associated with his profession of exploration geology. I became engaged creating original art quilts shortly after moving to the USA in 1988 for a couple of years, at the same time becoming very aware of the different colours of everything in our new environment – cars, fabrics, house and interior decorator colours, furniture, and particularly the vegetation! As we arrived in the Fall, even the forests (a mix of evergreen and the deciduous Aspens in CO) were showing their autumn leaves, which was new for us; most natural Australian vegetation is non-deciduous and does not change colour with the seasons. I realised that I associate particular places we’ve lived with different groups of colours, and as my work developed I found myself using colours that fellow (American) art quilters were not using; and people began commenting on my different colour sense which I attribute to ingrained memory heightened by being in a foreign environment. From 1990 – 2004 my work includes my Colour Memory Quilts, which developed at the same time as my intrigue with the role of line in my designs; and I named them after places and my experiences in those places that their colours evoked in my memory. Here are some examples:

From early friday afternoon Easter Time (USA), the bidding will open Diamond Day, the first day of the annual SAQA Benefit Auction. for the first 24 hours all works will be available for US$1000. On Monday 16th bidding for Group 1 starts at $750, and in this reverse auction the price goes down every day… but don’t leave it to chance that your first choices will still be available as the price falls!! You don’t need to be a member of SAQA to become a collector – and I’d love to welcome a repeat or a new collector to my followers with the sale of this one!

For detailed information on how the auction works, check out all the ~ 450 pieces on offer, and to register your details as a bidder, go to https://www.saqa.com/auction/auctionFAQ

I recently encountered the fibreart of British artist Christine Ryan, from whose artist statement I culled these few key sentences and phrases – “I am interested in the effects of weathering, erosion and time, which turn the most robust of natural and manmade features into a fragile state of change, breaking down and building up layer upon layer….” In her statement she refers frequently to the ebb and flow rhythms of events and change in Life and landscapes, a theme that has been in my work for many years as the Ebb&Flow series. She likens these ebbs and flows to our memories which can be fragmentary or fleeting, and, like various marks on a surface, these may give clues to their meaning or their source. Think ancient human markings on cave walls and rock surfaces which mark the start of all human recorded information about group history, lifestyle and memory of important events.

A key concept in my Ebb&Flow series is that nothing stays the same for ever. Throughout our lives, people come and go, by birth, marriage and death; neighbours move in and out; or we ourselves change our geographical location, and our health and financial situation can change, too. Considering Landscape as a metaphor for Life, no matter how stable and unchanging that landscape looks, the action of the elements over time is constantly eroding it somewhere (denudation) and building it up somewhere else (deposition). A beach is the perfect metaphor for a life, as daily visits show very little change as tides come in and receed, but the occasional storm can drastically change the profile of that beach, and so it is with a person’s life.