{"id":493,"date":"2009-06-04T13:23:38","date_gmt":"2009-06-04T18:23:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.alisonschwabe.com\/weblog\/?p=493"},"modified":"2009-06-15T10:08:41","modified_gmt":"2009-06-15T15:08:41","slug":"quilt-national-2009-a-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.alisonschwabe.com\/weblog\/?p=493","title":{"rendered":"QUILT NATIONAL 2009 – A REVIEW"},"content":{"rendered":"

Hi everyone – so the exhibition is now open and will be at the Dairy Barn in Athens, Ohio for the next 3 months until it is divided into three smaller touring groups to travel to museums and regional galleries.\u00a0 Once again I was privileged to be present at the opening, always a special pleasure if you are one of the exhibitors; and I was delighted to meet fellow exhibitor from Perth Western Australia,\u00a0 Ruth de Vos, and admire her finely pieced, dyed and screen printed\u00a0 “Eucalyptus Spectacular”.\u00a0 <\/em>Margery Goodall, also\u00a0 from Perth WA , showed a quartet of small quilts comprising her work “Earth Suite”,<\/em>\u00a0 intricately pieced abstracted landscapes which through colour and texture celebrate the harsh brown contintent of Australia.\u00a0\u00a0 Other Australians in the show are Pamela Fitzsimons and Glenys Mann.\u00a0 Pamela’s piece, “Extinction Wrap”\u00a0<\/em>is a wonderful composition of sheer layers, of pieced and stitched\u00a0hand dyed\u00a0silk organza, suggesting decay to me – I don’t think I’d have made the habitat destruction and animal extinction connection without reading her statement, though.\u00a0 Glenys Mann’s work was sombre, as befitting the title “Horizons #61:Memorial”,<\/em>\u00a0pondering a\u00a0death as\u00a0memorialised\u00a0by a wreath image she observed.
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\nThere were some very exciting works, my personal favourites including Erin Wilson’s “Miscellany”,<\/em> Kent Williams’ “Take Five” ,<\/em> Clare Plug’s “Antarctica <\/em>Series: Out on the Barrier”, <\/em>Christine Tedesco’s “Architectural Squares”,<\/em> Patricia M Goffette’s “Haywire”<\/em> and Bonnie Wells’ “Metaphysic”.\u00a0\u00a0<\/em>As usual there were\u00a0several I honestly thought were not in the right venue, ie not up to the high standard of the others in terms of design or innovation, the kind of thing one can see in the breathless pages of\u00a0 the ‘innovative’ sections of some art quiliting magazines and which are not new, regardless of how well composed the accompanying statement was.\u00a0 No, I won’t single them out – make up\u00a0your own mind\u00a0 when you see the show or the catalogue.<\/p>\n

A wide variety of technical expertise and interesting design inspirations expressed arists’ visions in this important exhibition of the quilt medium as art.\u00a0 It’s not a quilt show, rather an art show in the quilted medium, something many, including self-styled quilt artists and aspirants, do not ‘get’ even yet, after 30 years of these biennials. Among the final selection were entries from a large number of countries outside the USA, reflecting Quilt National’s continued importance in the field of the art of the quilt internationally.<\/p>\n

I have been to see many of the QN exhibitions and agree with one of this year’s\u00a0jurors who expressed\u00a0some\u00a0disappointment that there were fewer large (ie bed-sized) quilts than ever this year, just a handful.\u00a0 My own (below) at 37″x29″, 94x74cm is pretty small,\u00a0 although it is not the smallest I have had on show there.\u00a0 This year there seemed more small pieces than ever.<\/p>\n

I am not sure what this trend says about the market for art quilts.\u00a0 Many artists recognise that the their quilts compete directly in the market place with paintings, with which many have\u00a0a common size range.\u00a0 It is true that probably most collectors are not able to display large works in their offices or homes.\u00a0 But I wonder whether there is not also a reluctance by the makers to invest the time and effort in the committment to a large project, the 2m-3m sized work that used to be more common in this exhibition.\u00a0 I’m thinking\u00a0of some stunning large works in past years by the late Sharon Heidingsfelder, Tim harding, Kyoung Ae Cho or Joan\u00a0Lintault.\u00a0 I think part of this\u00a0has to do with the proliferation of computer aided design techniques, the ability to produce these designs quickly\u00a0but only on a small scale outside a tertiary insitution studio, and the expansion of ‘surface design’ in the artform, narrowly interpreted to involve paints dyes and related technique, on the front of the quilt, thereby achieving designs rapidly and with great detail, that in the past took many painstaking hours by machine or hand stitch.<\/p>\n

On the whole I felt the recipients of awards were worthy, they are on the website www.dairybarn.org<\/a> \u00a0now, and our Aussie colleague Glenys Mann received an award for her persistence in entering repeatedly without making the cut until this time. Congratulations Glenys. There were some exhibitors who were successful years ago and appearing again at long last, and just over 50% were first time exhibitors. I think this augurs well for the future.<\/p>\n

The catalogue is well worth reading for the interesting comments by each of the jurors, and some of the artist statements too were interesing.\u00a0 But not all. My own view is that the best statement is a really good title, and\u00a0 if a statement is really required\u00a0it should be as brief as possible.\u00a0 Clearly not everone has equal facility with words. One\u00a0 or two artists made no accompanying statement, which I admire.\u00a0 But the last time I did that, somehow my image was the only one left out of\u00a0the exhibition\u00a0catalogue, and I’ve always felt this was\u00a0some petty\u00a0move directly against my lack of comment. Some of the artist statements, IMHO, border on a self congratulating review, and many include technical details which again IMHO have no place in an artist statement.\u00a0 As usual several are almost imcomprehensible statements supporting an interesting quilt design; and I think we could all benefit from wider discussion on the whole matter of statements.<\/p>\n

However, the catalogue itself is subject of some negative comment, as this year the colour reproduction is very poor.\u00a0 My own quilt comprises basically black organza over a cream background with organza strips wandering across it; in real life a bit reminiscent of a sepia photo, but on page 95 of my copy it shows as having a greenish cast.\u00a0 Clare Plug (NZ)is disappointed that her work including shading from dark charcoal through greys to off white has definitely been presented as much darker and in shades of brown.\u00a0 I could go on, but overall the images are dark, a bit dull, and disappointing.\u00a0 If you don’t know the original this is not really bad, perhaps, but it doesn’t represent each work well.<\/p>\n

Although this year’s collection\u00a0did not feel as strong and did not excite me as much as some previous ones, I think Quilt National still holds it’s place as a premier event in the world of contemporary quilted fiber art.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hi everyone – so the exhibition is now open and will be at the Dairy Barn in Athens, Ohio for the next 3 months until it is divided into three smaller touring groups to travel to museums and regional galleries.\u00a0 Once again I was privileged to be present at the opening, always a special pleasure […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-493","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6uxpF-7X","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonschwabe.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/493","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonschwabe.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonschwabe.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonschwabe.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonschwabe.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=493"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonschwabe.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/493\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":506,"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonschwabe.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/493\/revisions\/506"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonschwabe.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=493"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonschwabe.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=493"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonschwabe.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=493"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}