Posts Tagged ‘songlines’

Roads Paths and Tracks – Symbols of Change

Monday, June 23rd, 2025
“Songlines of The 4WDrovers” Arranged on our coffee table for a while (we sit in the other room near the fire during winter!)

The recent surprise unearthing of the above work, Songlines of the 4WDrovers, featuring wandering lines, strips of fabric connecting the double sided panels featuring images of landscapes and roads, inevitably led to comparing it with some contemporaneous 2D works, and revealed the importance of what I’ve always described as ‘wandering strips’ in my quilts c.1993 to early 2010: all these strips represent movement, relocation and travel, by road, rail or air. That is, they all represent change.

I’ve mentioned before that because of Mike’s profession as an exloration geologist, in the first two decade of our married life, we fairly often pulled up stakes and moved to different Australian Outback mining centres. In late 1987 we moved to Denver USA, and once there I came under the spell of traditional American geometric patchwork and quilting, particularly those with the characterisitic grid layouts of repeated geometric designs or motifs. In 1990 I took a workshop from Nancy Crow, in which a student asked her to show her how to insert the wonderfully precise 1/2inch strips Nancy included in some of her early, very complex quilts. As I worked on whatever the class exercises were, I was listening to the brief little demo taking place nearby. I’m a good listener, and took in enough to successfully work out at home what I’d been hearing from Nancy’s demo: using the ruler, cut the background fabric where you want the strip to go; cut a 1″strip, and using 1/4″ seam allowances, sew the strip into the base fabric background. I don’t recall where I got the idea to cross some strips, but I did know to cut the base fabric larger to allow for strips to exactly cross, and once they were sewn in, trim the background/base fabric to the desired final size.

Western Desert”, 1993, 30 x 30in (on black BG) I learned how to cross stripes over each other without the result looking disjointed…
“Lilydale” 1991 168 x 256cm. These triangles are about 50cm tall, because those sides are on the bias, tended to give or slip a little as I cut them, and despite using a ruler, a straight line was almost impossible – so I learned how to handle very slightly curved 1/2″ strips…

By this time, a mental association of colours with particular places in my past had become another signature element, and I was giving quilts titles that reflected those. In another Nancy Crow workshop she showed us how to freehand cut and piece curved fabric shapes, in what is today known as ‘improvisational piecing’. This was a wonderful addition to the skills I found important in the many landscape quilts that followed, and it became one of my signature style elements in much of what I did until the early 2000s:

Forecast: Cooler, Windy 1993. 88cm sq. (black BG)
“Songlines” 1997.   44 x 200cm           
“New Directions”, 2000, 96 x 84cm

Then other ways of showing landscapes and tracks or paths gradually developed – in the whole ‘Tracks’ series, paths and tracks also came to include the results of erosion processes, the marks made on the Earth’s and other surfaces over time…

Postcard sized miniature quilts from the ‘Travel Pages’ series ~2005.
“Desert Tracks 3” 2005, 137 x 107cm
“Regeneration 2” 2019 40cm sq.
“Sunburnt Country” 2021 60 x 40cm

In the last few years, there has been further change in my art, which I’d loosely describe as “grids with stitch textured units”, and they’ll be the subject of another post sometime soon.

Rapid Landscape Change

Saturday, February 15th, 2020

I see landforms in terms of the denudation-deposition cycle, metaphorically equal to what happens over the life of a human body, including the less tangible aspects of being ‘alive’ – such as personality, character, knowledge, relationships, perceptions, beliefs and so on. In short, nothing stays the same over time. We are surrounded by change, but it is often at such a slow pace that we don’t even register it happening day to day right before our eyes.

But sometimes things happen really fast, too. In Australia’s current bushfire season, beginning September-October 2019, bushfires have wreaked havoc over much of the country. Vast areas have been burned out, people have lost lives, homes, businesses and farms. Many people were compelled to flee to safer areas to escape roaring walls of flame driven by strong winds, heading their way too fast to fight and contain. Sometimes their property was spared, but often evacuees had nothing left to return to, and in some instances whole towns were obliterated. The loss of human life, which though low considering the cicumstances, was devastating for the families and communities from which those people came. Several were firefighters themselves. Many domestic and wild animals were killed, with some estimates as high as a billion in total: we’ll never know for sure, but the toll was huge.

Change has continued though, as since early february many of the dried or burnt areas have received at least some rainfall courtesy a moderate cyclone and the arrival of the monsoon in the region. Much rain has fallen on the coastal plains and some, not a lot, has pushed inland, so the severe drought is not yet broken completely, but there is hope. The worst of the dreadful fires are now out or under control due to this rain, which has been so heavy in some parts that flash flooding has become problematic.

Photos and film footage are showing that in the earliest burned areas vegetation has been sprouting. Some trees are sprouting new leaves, and grass has returned to bone dry paddocks, illustrating how rapidly the Australian landscape can regenerate, as it has for countless thousands of years. It is this story of regeneration and hope that I want to underlie some planned new works. There is no problem with colour schemes themselves – think black, various shades of grey (up to 50 …) red, orange, sandy colours, dark brown and the bright greens of fresh new vegetation.

I’m thinking in terms of mini-landscapes such as this sample I made to be part of a presentation to a mini-landscape workshop a few years ago:

Mini landscape area approx 7cm x 5cm , on black background. 2013.

I’ve often used such little landscape compilations or units within larger works, and looking at these next two quilts reminds me of how much Outback travel I have done looking at the passing changing landscape!

Songlines” 1997 40cm x 200cm
Ticket To Munmalary ” 1997 120cm x 150cm.
Landscape scenery changing as if on a long journey by car bus or train. Photographed against a yellow background, for some reason!

These patchwork units were all improvisationally pieced before being machine appliqued to their background fabric. However, I’ve just realised such units could also be constructed by cutting to fit precisely together like a jigsaw puzzle, fused to a background, cut out from that before hand or machine sewing onto the quilt top. I’m experimenting.

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