Well no, I don’t especially love MIA. Like most travellers I don’t especially like most airports, particularly if I’m in transit. (An exception is Singapore’s Changi) A lay-over is either tight (you have to speed walk or run) or you have several hours to kill, with emphasis on ‘kill’. There is no ideal lay-over unless it involves a shower and horizontal time between sheets, somewhere sound insulated and close to said airport.
MIA sprawls over huge distances, with long concourses, only some of which are served by a skytrain or moving walkways. It’s much like other US airports, except for the wonderful floors in some parts – these pics were taken on concourse D, around 5.30 am.
So to arrive at MIA one morning last week at 4am from Montevideo, UY, gave me plenty of time to kill until my 7.45am flight to Denver.
With few people around and most shops still closed, I was able to take my time to photograph and enjoy the lovely brass inlays in the man made granite-like flooring presenting a tidal shore theme entirely fitting with the city’s coastal and near-Caribbean location.
While there are plenty of large starfish and shell shapes, many smaller fragmenty things are easily overlooked in a hurry, and these are lovely little snippets of brass seaweed, coral and sponges.
My theme might now must be more obvious – what lovely patterns holes can make.
And I still had heaps of time to enjoy a coffee and some people watching near my boarding gate!
I find looking at Pinterest is like thumbing through a few magazines, looking to see what’s the latest in something I’m interested in like architecture, or sculptures in the wild, stitchery, whatever. Pinterest sends me at least one but usually several emails a day, most of which I bin immediately – namely those beginning with “Your pin from textures was saved 4 times….” typical and frequent, or to take an actual example from my inbox today: “18 Newspaper basket pins you might like…” Good grief… newspaper baskets! Others, though, I just keep aside in the social section of my email where FB and LinkedIn messages also arrive. I’m not sure what is ‘social’ about Pinterest, but that’s where they are, and I look at them in a browsing session which often happens to be sunday morning.
I have boards titled with the broad topics I follow – presentations, lines and shapes, holes, textures, edge treatment, contemporary hand stitch, FME (free machine embroidery) sheers, using fragments’ or … , art to wear possibilities, interesting artists, drama in design. Although typically I don’t collect recipes in any format, paper or digital, I do have a board with one recipe in it- I must have been impressed enough to save it, which says something.
Pinterest also allows you to have two ‘secret’ boards not visible to anyone else looking at your pins. Just now I noticed one secret board I titled ‘aide memoire’ had just one puzzling image which I didn’t remember pinning –
so clicked on it to find this interesting little nail decorating website and vaguely remember posting it now, and why. I’m interested in embellishing with fine dots, so it is a reminder of a neat trick I might need sometime.
One of the biggest boards/collections I have on Pinterest is lines and shapes. of course, lines and shapes can be arranged infinite combinations. I could have ‘mark making’ too, but find all that goes just fine into ‘lines and shapes’.
Contemporary jewellery in a wide variety of media is a rich source for line/shape patterns, and comes in a wide variety of media available to all artisan craftsmen. Neck pieces, brooches and things that are almost garments offer plenty of presentation ideas for mixed media textile art – take the work of Helga Mogensen working in driftwood, fish skin and metals with fibre. Morgensen uses sturdy twine to fasten units together with knots and the freely dangling ends are a textural contrast, part of the overall design. Andrea Williams uses waterworn stones, precious metals and some natural fibres. Williams’ works look as if they’re somehow stitched or tied together, but these patterns of lines that look like stitches are in fact inlaid precious metals. Of course I have no intention of copying their works, but save/pin them merely because they are stimulating and inspiring, and sometimes suggest ideas for a new approach in my textile art.
All artists keep a file, plastic bag, shoebox or on online collection of inspiring images and ideas. This is the huge value of Pinterest.
For “From Pillars to Posts: Project Another Country, 2018″ , Filipino husband-and-wife artists Isabel and Alfredo Aquilizan, themselves having migrated to Australia in 2006, explore the issues surrounding the concept of home. Using recycled cardboard boxes to create a model city while exploring the concepts and issues around migration, change, memory, community, resettlement, acceptance, inclusion, family and more, the fascinating installation included a workspace supplied with tools and materials so that visitors could themselves make and contribute small cardboard houses to add into the installation. It was suggested they could make a model of the home they currently live in, one they lived in some time in the past, their dream home or an imaginary one.
Writing about exhibitions I’ve seen often often expands on ideas and thoughts that didn’t immediately register when I was visiting them, and this one especially so.
As an Australian who, because of Mike’s work, has twice lived outside my own country for lengthy periods (USA 1987-94, Uruguay 2000 – present) I found this interview with the Aquilizans highly relevant to my own life. Perhaps their most compelling words were: When you move, it is always a wrenching process not only on the idea that you are actually leaving home but also the process of choosing what to leave behind and what to bring along with you. What do you really need to start a new life? There is always that feeling of uncertainty, vagueness and tentativeness that diverting it to an art form, it becomes a process of healing.
Our overseas periods were initially both intended to be 2-3 years of temporarily living and working elsewhere before returning to Australia, but neither case turned out exactly to plan. We did return to Australia after 6+ years in the USA, but 3 years later came the call to for Mike come to Uruguay to search for gold. In each case, because of expectations that our absences would be only temporary and short, we made the ‘take/leave’ decisions on a relatively small scale, taking only some papers, cds and a few favourite books, and storing the rest until our return. If the question had been put to me all those years ago “How would you like to emigrate to Uruguay?” I’d have told Mike he was on his own – as I would never have agreed to emigrate from the best country on Earth. But in effect that is what has happened, more or less – as after nearly 20 years we’re still away đ Last year for a number of good reasons we decided to sell the Australian house we’d left in the care of a series of house minders. Naturally, after settlement we had to clear out our stuff, and spent several days discarding and donating a huge amount of all kinds of things – some I was glad to have an excuse to ditch, others I felt sorry or even guilty about. Then came the packers to prepare what was left for storage. As the packing raced ahead, we caught glimpses of stuff we hadn’t seen for years but hadn’t forgotten: books; vinyls and turntables; some furniture; kitchen gear; beds and bedding; paintings and other art; a couple heirlooms; stamps, rocks, and fabric collections. That was tantalising, and each of us grabbed a couple of small things to bring back in our luggage.
The whole clearing out, discarding and consigning to storage process caused me to consider how temporarily we are anywhere on earth, really; and to reflect on the role of ‘important stuff’ in our lives. I dismissed a well-meaning comment from an old friend who’d never lived anywhere else and hasn’t even moved house in the same town: “You’ve lived without it all for 20 years, so why not just get rid of the lot?” He sort of had a point, but if we weren’t being forced to ditch the lot, why should we?
As “Project Another Country” had been open since April, by December it had become gloriously crowded with little ‘homes’ ranging from very simple to elaborate – and was quite wonderful to see. This installation visibly appealed to people of all ages, and if I’d had more time I’d have sat down to construct something myself, but by the time I discovered this gallery, it was nearly time to leave for the airport, and I thought my best use of time was to just look and enjoy it before leaving the gallery to collect our bags and go.
It was our last day in NZ and it was also raining quite heavily – so what better place than in an art gallery or museum for walking around for a few hours before boarding a long flight? In a previous post I wrote of a wonderful morning at the Auckland Art Gallery – and have another interesting work of art to share from that visit – Shield For Ancient Mothers by Claudia Pond Eyley The artist statement for this series begins “Images from art made by women of other cultures are a continuous theme in the series of âshieldâ paintings she began in 1983.” The rest of the text to this collection and elsewhere on her website is so powerful that the didactic panel below her work seems a bit flimsy now, but I am leaving it in this post, because I’m sure it’s prompted others to learn more about Claudia Eyley’s art. Again, in my ignorance of things cultural in New Zealand, she was new to me. Visit her website, it’s truly stunning.
I think this is a wonderful painting. Of course I relate to the eternally iconic themes of femininity, fertility, motherhood and all that – and always find its various cultural expressions interesting. One thing about this work caused me to spend a lot of time enjoying this painting is that maybe not in 1983, but certainly in 2019, the artist could have made this piece as a textile work, an art quilt. A textile artist would have used plain, patterned and hand dyed fabrics, digital and other low tech ways of painting onto that fabric before machine sewing the parts together, quilting and finishing it off with a fine binding. Another approach would have been to paint and print onto a single piece of fabric (whole cloth) before quilting and finishing. ‘Trending’ (a useful word I love/hate) today is the use of text as a decorative or design element. It’s not new in most media, but textile artists now have so many techniques by which text can now be applied and used that is driving a new popularity for text. Claudia Eyley applied lettering highlighting key concept words – water, fire, blood, stone.
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Based on geometric shapes ( the triangular shields) and bordered by assemblies of lines, squares, rectangles and triangles, this whole piece bears a strong connection to traditional patchwork, the units of which are still used creatively by non-traditional quilters today. Though I didn’t find actual reference to ‘quilts’ in her website, seeing other pieces in this series and noting her deep seated concerns and inspirations in other work, I feel this may have been a conscious choice of format. Her statement refers to the usefulness of mosaics, of how shapes that fit together enable collaging and assembling of units – the general term for which of course is ‘patchwork.’ From this and other series images it is easy to feel these works are imbued with caring and nurturing implied in patchworked bed covers.
Many art quilt makers produce work that begins with or is fundamentally derived from repeated units that can be collaged once their surface design (by almost infinite technical means) has been worked. My own work is full of them:
Repeated squares and triangles, the building blocks of patchworked mosaics.
My introduction to patchwork was via traditional geometric patterning. I made one antique style Flying Geese wall quilt before my need to create original designs took over. However, I love the cutting and piecing of shapes – it remains my go-to technique and I am one of many art quilt makers working improvisationally, while more makers use paint, stencilling or print to achieve surface designs based on geometric shapes.
Late last year we spend a few days with family in New Zealand, and on our last morning we visited the Auckland Art Gallery – NZ’s largest public gallery.
There was this group of paintings by Colin McCahon, and several others by him in other galleries -as he is New Zealand’s most important modern artist, it’s no surprise the Auckland Art Gallery has several in it’s collection. This group was on show:
10/14 Stations Of The Cross by Colin McCahon. Pillars in the gallery prevented me photographing the whole suite end to end (L-R).
On first sight, I instinctively knew these paintings depicted landscape. I studied physical geography and geomorphology, and as a user of very diagrammatic representation of landscape features myself, this group of paintings brought me to a screeching halt. I must confess, in my appalling Australian ignorance, I hadn’t heard of the artist, Colin McCahon. Let me plead living on the other side of the world from Australia for 27 of the last 30 years – if I’d lived closer, maybe …
Though I taught for a couple of years at a Christian Brothers College (Kalgoorlie, WA, 1973-4) and really loved it, I found it never seemed to matter to everyone that I was not Roman Catholic; so until I came to write this post I’d never really studied beyond my basic understanding of the Stations of The Cross
McCahon’s life (1919-1987) was complex and troubled, but he is acknowledged to have been New Zealand’s most important modern artist, with a large, well documented body of work including abstract, figuration, landscape and overlay of text. Q: – Are painful experiences necessary for someone to become a great artist?
These paintings made me think of the work of an American textile artist, Lisa Call , formerly of Colorado, who 2013 moved to a new life in New Zealand. In 2015, during a return visit to Colorado, she staged an exhibition, “Endless Horizon: 14000 Feet to Seal Level” of new works in Denver. Visiting CO at the time, and being very familiar with her work, I was taken with her totally new colour palette and the adaptation of her signature lines across patches of colour to form a ‘diagrammatic’ style of evocative abstract landscapes inspired by her new country. To read more about influences she sees on her work, visit https://lisacall.com
