Virtual Slide Lecture – Influences and Timetracks

May 16th, 2023

My regular readers will know that the most important ongoing influence in my art has been landscape, in various ways that have evolved over time.  I assembled this collage image for a pre-pandemic class on advanced freehand patchwork, and as an example of how ‘landscape’ provides inspiration for an art quilt, this one is perfect.  The Dairy Barn Athens OH chose the image to promote an online slide lecture I will present on June 29th.  For more information and registration, visit the Dairy Barn’s website “Timetracks-a-guide-to-exploring-influences” in their summer Quilt National Workshops series.

You could go back to the beginning of this blog early in 2005 and read all the way through from then to now, and you’d have some idea of how and why my art has developed the way it has… but you could also register for this presentation. This talk is an opportunity to present a survey of my art, and thank goodness I’ve always had a good photographic record taken of it: 🙂

Quoting from the Dairy Barn website: “Quilt National ‘23 exhibiting artist, Alison Schwabe, presents a slide lecture and Q&A, on the process of personal artistic development. Alison details how personal influences, combined with evolving techniques, can be developed into impactful themes for one’s own artwork. Landscape and geographic change have been the starting point of Alison’s creative practice for over five decades.“

In addition to showing my own work with reference to particular inspirations and influences, the evening will be a learning opportunity, too: “In this lecture, participants will learn how to identify, observe and record their own sources of inspiration to translate into artworks. Alison will share specific fiber arts techniques, focusing on the importance of adaptation and exploration of materials, to best serve the chosen theme. The Q&A portion of this event will allow participants to get specific insights into the challenges and successes of long-lasting conceptual designs.”

I look forward to sharing personal insights into how my life has influenced my art, and hope the that evening audience will include you.

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Major Decision Points, 2

April 30th, 2023

Photos taken over the past couple of days show rapid progress has been made since I just took a couple of key decisions. With these wool coat fabrics, I’ve never had the intention of binding, hemming or facing even with cotton, as any of them would be too clunky, and buttonholing too much of a ‘blanket’ cliche suggesting a connection I didn’t want viewers to focus on, in the same way as if I’d included belt loops, collars, pockets and buttonholes they would have made it clear this fabric had a previous life as a coat or jacket. I didn’t even want it to say ‘this had a previous life’ of any kind at all.

Somewhere along the way I decided to make what appeared to be moth damage as the edge finish for this work.

Left – the last few threads of the quilting mesh grid pattern to finish off and darn in. On the right – a bit of the motheaten treatment at one corner, and I’m loving it.

The main question now is whether to put a woolly element at each grid intersection, or to park some in the triangular shapes – and if so, every triangle, the ones sitting base down point up, or some random distribution?

The large stitch quilting is done with one of the strands of the knitting wool – they easily separated out, and are quite strong enough for the job.

I’ve done enough on this today and it seems a good idea to sleep on it; but whatever I decide to add will need to be placed before I attach the sleeve to the back. I also think I’ll put either some black squares or some knit patches on the back in places, too, to ensure the 60% minimum wool composition on both front and back is beyond question. The minimum perimeter measurement is 300cm, and the work exceeds that comfortably, so that’s OK.

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Major Decision Points

April 28th, 2023

A lot of my work is improvisational, and I find I need to keep an eye open for that point, which might come up unexpectedly early, when it suddenly becomes clear that I’ve done enough – that I’ve completed all I wanted to convey with a work and it’s done, bar the finishing off. Quite unexpectedly the other day I realised that enough squares, 49, have been stitched, and although the grid was basted envisaging all 225 squares would be filled in, I think it’s more powerful to stop, hand quilt and edge it, not necessarily in that order.

Using neon green over the yellow green strips, and black over the dark green/blue strips increases the dimensionality.

There are other times when I need to stop thinking around the subject and just start!    Burdening my mind for days has been the fear of how the hand stitched triangular mesh I’ve had in mind for the front will look on the black/red back side of the quilt. I just haven’t been able to consider any other possibility than this particular mesh pattern, and realised that it needed to be stitched first before I place some bits of knitted samples that I’ve been playing around with. I’ll probably add some small red pieces, but I might audition metallic leather, too, as the work progresses.  But for various reasons to do with construction, I determined the stitched mesh grid needs to go into place first, and that’s what’s been bothering me. I’ve been mentally going round and round, over, under and through, because as you probably know, the quilting’s usually the last process before finishing off and adding the sleeve .

So this morning I stopped mentally dithering, threaded up a fresh needle with one of the wool threads and just started stitching – big, freehand stitched lines, across the front from side to side:

The two wool fabrics are thick enough to not need any batting, and I found that the stitches I’ve done hardly appear on the back after all – this is so different from working in cotton! In this photo, the back edge has been folded over onto the front – to show the stitches on each side. The tip of the needle is at one stitch on the red – they hardly show at all – but I may add a few little black bits to the red on the back and now feel much more free about all that, too.

What an interesting challenge this work has turned out to be.

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Interpretations 23, San Diego

April 27th, 2023

Good news to hand is that one of my entries, “Caribbean Crush” is among the 37 art quilts selected for this year’s “Interpretations 23” exhibition at the Visions Museum of Textile Art, San Diego.  It opens October 14th and runs through December 30th.

It is a technique I wrote of developing last year, inspired by one of the workshops I took with Stitch Club; and in that link you can read about the first small piece I made with it, for the SAQA 2022 benefit auction. So I won’t go into the full technical details again – but in summary I hand hand stitched hundreds of small scrap pieces of cotton fabric onto a base fabric, then edged it and did a bit of quilting to hold the layers together – which ended up an area of 97cm x 98cm .

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Chrysalid – A Small But Interesting Exhibition

April 25th, 2023

On Saturday we got out and about in beautiful weather and headed over to Museo Blanes to see a small but interesting exhibition by Uruguayan fibre artist Sylvia Umpierrez.   In translation, her general artist statement says of her inspiration from Nature:  “Through my work I want to awaken new sensations about the beauty of nature, take another look at what is dry, what has no value for many, for me, it is the beginning of my fabrics”.

The curator’s exhibition statement reminds us how utilitarian and symbolic roles of woven cloth and basketry reach back far into the mists of human history.  Though undoubtedly descended from such practical intent as her Catalan ancestors’ hand crafted fishing baskets, the works in this exhibition are highly representative of Umpierrez’s interest in the used, dried vegetable materials that Nature has cast before her to select as raw materials for new woven forms.   Additionally, we learned that the particular vines and other plant forms the artist used here have healing and medicinal properties, giving additional symbolic connection to the woven fabrics with which we are surrounded from our moment of birth.  

The keynote piece of the show, this two piece composition suggested to me that the creature had left, leaving behind something of an afterbirth, which of course isn’t what actually happens when a metamorphosed chrysalid emerges from its cocoon.

Even without knowing the particular properties of these plants, it is clear from the empty containers or cocoons ‘vacated’ by metamorphosed creatures that they had already emerged from the dry dead materials to continue living in their newly hatched forms as moths or butterflies.

This was my favourite, so light and lyrical and of course the shadows it threw onto the wall are lovely.
All the pieces were suspended using barely noticeable nylon thread which gave wonderful sense of ethereal mystery to the collection including the several large dried philodendron leaves that hovered among the forms.
Some papier mache, perhaps applied to give the impression of mud and pointing to intimate contact with the earth.

This exhibition is open until May 28th, and I urge anyone within reach of this wonderful Montevideo museum to get along and see it. Museo Blanes is open Tuesday-Sunday, 12noon to 6pm, and entry is free. And it’s always worth strolling through the Figari collection there, followed by some time standing in awe in front of the vast Blanes painting of The Oath Of The Thirty-Three Orientals, too.

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