So many ideas, so little time! With several important calls for entry in mind, plus visitors and possibly some travel looming in the middle months of the year, I’m starting some new works. It’s really quiet in the neighbourhood, and many of our friends are along the coast or out of the country – with regular activities in summer recess. In a recent post I wrote a goal in my current planning: “These new works need to reflect my current focus on texture and grids of a kind…” and yesterday I spent quite a bit of time reviewing recent and early works plus those all important samples that I never throw away. In the last few years I’ve photographed them as I went along and often posted them on FB or Instagram. But there are others – and I’ll go through the large tote-bag of samples to make sure I didn’t forget one snippet of an idea to consider.

Another important part of my process is to look through my Pinterest pins. I have a board labelled ‘Grids!’, and from those 200+ images I’ve saved several in a Word document labelled “Grid Ideas” The images are cropped to capture just the essence of that particular grid idea, which also saves printer ink!

Why grids? A grid layout is perhaps the most prominent infuence in my art from the brief time I spent making traditional patchwork quilts. Next comes my love of pieced fabrics in basic geometric shapes, aka patchwork, and the use of hand stitched textures that I’ve loved since I was very young. Somewhere I reached understanding that a grid pattern represents order and stability. Ancient mapmakers and surveyors understood the importance of a grid as a framework of reference on direction and distance. Laws and social customs provide important written and spoken frames of reference for groups of people. In today’s turbulent world long-accepted frames of reference, those international agreements and laws plus rule of law in various countries, collectively known as rules based order, have begun disintegrating in some regions. Perhaps I heard someone say it… or maybe my mind started thinking of a wonky, crooked grid as a sign of ‘rules based disorder’ … as recently I’ve made several small pieces with this title. There will be more off-kilter grids, and I’m aiming for lines and stitched textures to be messy, too – because as I wrote on October 24th last: “A life can be long or short, and it can be a smooth continuum, but it is more likely to be untidy in places, occasionally punctuated by upheavals or mistakes at some points along the way. Fabric marked by stitches is a statement or an exploration of something on the artist’s mind, and, just like a life, a stitchery can have messy stops, starts and changes of directions, stitches or threads along the way.”

Selecting, auditioning and deleting got the word document down to 3 pages which I printed off to take up to my workroom. Those pages look like this one –

The above examples uses only images of my own works, but the 3 sheets compiled from my research contains these and several more examples of how others have used the concept of ‘grid’ as a layout. It’s then up to me to work out how I’m going to use techniques I know and/or love to combine them into cohesive works.