In 1978, I attended a wonderful 8-day summer school / symposium at a conference centre at Goolwa, South Australia. It was organised by a group of very experimental stitchers within the South Australian Embroiderers’ Guild, who then went on to publish a wonderful book about the ideas and techniques they’d taught us. We were taught by a team of three highly qualified embroiders a couple of whom were academics in tertiary art or textile art schools. That amazing workshop had a huge ongoing impact on my fibreart, and in the next decade I combined paint with stitch, embroidering my impressions of the landscape around me.
My only traditional quilt, a Flying Geese design, was begun in a symposium workshop with the then doyenne of Flying Geese, and author of a book on the subject, Blanche Young. This is an awful photo!! The question is, why was I in such a hurry that I couldn’t take a decent one? However, the wall quilt’s storage at the moment, so this will have to do.
In 1987 I was invited to exhibit my fibreart interpretations of landscape. As I prepared for that exhibition, someone advised me to have everything photographed for my record – which was sound advice, although the choice of photographers for hire in the mining town where we lived at the time was limited – between a wedding/portrait photographer and another whose day job was the official company photographer for the biggest mining company in the region. It didn’t occur to me to ask Murray to photograph my art against a plain neutral background – and so everything was photographed against a rather nasty bare brick wall… which in my innocence I saw nothing wrong with! But bless him, Murray’s lighting and focus were excellent, and at least I had a 35mm slide record of my work! I’ve had a few of those slide images digitised, including this one, cropped to eliminate that brick wall 🙂
Soon after we arrived to live in Denver CO for a short time, a new neighbour took me along to her local quilt guild which I immediately joined and began learning traditional geometric patchwork and quilting. I took some construction classes and joined quilting bee for the cultural experience, which turned out to be the hardest group I’ve ever had to leave, anywhere, as the ‘short time’ durned into seven years. I made just one traditional wall quilt, of the flying geese design, and began to design my own non-traditional quilts a year later.
Way back in my early art quilt making days probably 1991 or 1992, I attended a monthly meeting of the Front Range Contemporary Quilters group at Boulder CO. The guest speaker, Patsy Allen of North Carolina, was a well known at quilter in the early 90s, having appeared in some of the earliest Quilt Nationals. Her slide lecture covered her portfolio of work produced over 10-15 years, showing that while her techniques and designs changed over that time, certain recognisable elements were present in every design. It was interesting to see how some elements became more prominent over time, and others became less significant, but their presence gave identifiable continuity through all her work. Like many other prominent art quilt makers, she advised us to always take as good photos of our work as our tech skills or means allow, and recommended occasionally reviewing our art in chronological order, looking for patterns of continuity and thinking about what inspires and influences us.
I recently gave a virtual lecture on the influences in my own works over the decades I’ve been making and exhibiting textile art. Of course, my techniques, materials and the focus of landscape’s influences have varied over time, but to put the talk together was enlightening. I do occasionally review my art in more-or-less chronological order every few years, and sometimes find an angle I never considered before. A couple of interesting questions from my audience after the lecture prompted further thought, too.
These days with digital cameras and phones, it’s easy to take progress photos of what we’re doing, though I only publish a few of them in my blog or on my social media sites. Taking pics of works in process encourages me to regularly review my general artist statement, possibly my bio, and write a brief statement, at least a sentence, about every work as I finish it, while my thinking on it is fresh in my mind.
My regular readers already know that this blog, the nearest I’ll ever come to an artist’s diary, is one line of documentation about my fibreart. My other documentation is a list of titles, dimensions, year completed, and like any list it’s a fairly dry or sterile document that I an quickly look up if I’m writing or answering a query. I what I call an illustrated catalogue, with an image of the work plus title, year, dimensions and availability or location of each work. I really should expand this to include a statement about it and the major points of it’s history – exhibition, sale etc…. but right now I am working on something that is starting to pull me upstairs to my sewing room, so I’ll deal with that another day.
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