Posts Tagged ‘working in a series’

Planning Mode, 3

Saturday, January 11th, 2025

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.

Ebb&Flow 26

Monday, September 24th, 2018

Round 2 of the 2018 SAQA Online Auction of 12″sq. quiltlets starts today at 2pm Eastern Daylight Time USA, 3am EST Australian time, 3pm Uruguay time.  The works are all donated by Studio Art Quilt members each year to support the organisation’s touring exhibition programme.  Full information on the auction and the online bidding form is all here

My donation, Ebb&Flow 26, is well down the page.  The background fabric is silver speckled black, and it’s machine quilted with silver metallic thread.

 

A couple of friends collect them and have attractively grouped several pieces together on walls in their homes – why not start your collection today?

Tracks And Marks

Wednesday, September 12th, 2018

 

 

Almost no one currently alive will ever find themselves in a landscape of any kind where they could be 100% sure no human has ever been, although on a deserted beach or a windswept landscape stretching into the distance, if you ignore the sometimes subtle tracks ahead, squint your eyes and forget your recent flight, bus, train hike, bike or boat trip that got you there, it may just be possible to imagine you are the first human to ever set foot on that landscape …

Though it took me years to actually name a group of works ‘Tracks’, I know that landscape shapes, colours and textures are all track marks left by Mother Nature on those surfaces.  Modern Man, too, has left many complicated marks – fences, pipelines, railways, roads, power lines, canals, airports and ports, marshalling yards, to say nothing of small towns and vast cities with horizontal mazes of streets, bridges and roads, and multilevel vertical mazes of human habitation –  really, the tracks of human activity are everywhere.  Though I have focused more on the patterning on artifacts and drawn images on rocks, cliffs, cave walls and open plains, the ‘tracks’ made by Man on landscapes are not limited to the ancient ones that I’ve always found so awe inspiring, intriguing as those are.

In the design of my quilt, New Directions, 2000, the multitude of lines from every direction represent the paths and tracks of human migration onto our continent in the last 60,000 years.  I have just read Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu  which details the agricultural practices of Australia’s indigenous Aboriginal people.  Until now, having grown up in Tasmania, and lived overseas for many years, I’d never heard of extensive fish traps on the great inland river systems, and the extensive areas planted with grains on the open plains, many of which were seen by the colonists but dismissed by settlers and farmers with European farming practice backgrounds.  Ignorant of the sustainable land management practices the indigenous people had practised for thousands of years, they dismissively assumed they were not civilised enough to have devised such systems.  This fascinating book has me thinking more about tracks and pathways.

The Chinese Coins Connection

Sunday, April 29th, 2018

A day or two ago I commented on facebook to Kay Korkos who showed a pic of a vibrant, colourful, bedquilt she made in the traditional Chinese Coins pattern.  I said how that particular pattern had provided ongoing inspiration for many pieces in my Ebb&Flow series which began around 2004.

But then I remembered that I had recently fished Green Island out of the cupboard, and that dates from 1996, so I’ve been inspired by chinese coins for much longer than I had thought.  I sat for a while, looking at it up on the design wall, as I hadn’t really looked at it in ages; and it sort of surprised me how much I love it.  I need to put it up somewhere – or perhaps someone else does 🙂  The irregular shaped top is internally reinforced so that the pieces stay upright flat against the wall and don’t flop forward.

Green Island 142cm x 104cm, 1996,  photographed against black

 

Element of Intermittency

Sunday, March 25th, 2018

Though there does not seem to be such a word, there should be, and it would be built from intermittent the same way that the word intimate gives rise to intimacy.  (I’ve just become hooked by Scrabble online, I’m a bit word conscious anyway but constantly amazed by what is and is not allowed as a word.)   In a few years’ time maybe you’ll look back and say you read it first right here on Alison’s blog; but regardless, I’m hereby declaring intermittency to be an element of discontinuity between lines and shapes in my Ebb&Flow works, the statement for which is “Series Concept – Nothing stays the same for ever.  With age, we recognise and understand the ebb and flow of people, places and fortune throughout our lives.”

I’ve been exploring this theme for over a decade. Mostly I deliberately construct the intermittencies; sometimes they’re accidental or seem so.  Beautiful shapes stop suddenly, perhaps connected by lines of stitching to where they resume elsewhere in the work, but they can also remain totally unconnected to anything.  Doesn’t Life itself have patches of that same thing, of intermittency, of abrupt discontinuity as various features of Life come and go, ebb and flow?  No, not your own life?  Well mine has certainly been characterised by serial intermittencies in the geographical and cultural senses.  We’ve had many moves, and the 12 years in this house is the longest time I’ve lived anywhere in my entire life.

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