EDITED UPDATE of original post September 6th, 2013.
In 2013 this quilt:“Life’s Rich Tapestry”, went up onto Lisa Call‘s FB page, in a discussion we were having about how embellishment was in each of our distant textile art pasts. She posted a very red and strong green quilt with lots of bead and glitter embellishment, a piece that seemingly has no connection to the plain uncluttered textile paintings she now does with austere lines, plain colour combinations and heavy machine quilting. We had both studied in classes with David Walker. My textile art roots go back to creative embroidery in the late 70’s until in the late 80s I ecountered patchwork and quilting. That soon morphed into the fairly new genre of ‘art quilting’ and I attended the first Quilt Surface Design Symposium in 1991. Lisa’s embellishment / embroidery experience with a David Walker class was a little later.
In that 1991 symposium workshop, David had us thinking about our own lives, sifting through events and exploring developments. An occasional saying of my husband Mike’s came to mind: ‘That’s just part of life’s rich tapestry’. I have no idea whether the title came first or it developed from the ideas I was exploring, but no matter. The elements of the design relate to the good and bad, darks and lights, positives and negatives, happy and sad, lean and plenty – the ‘things’ in life that constantly shift balance and change from day to day, week to week, year to year, one factor of which was the various relocations we’ve had on account of his profession. There’s a bit of management and a bit of luck in that mix, too.
In that memorable class we all developed some imagery to use in our original art quilt designs.
Because Bernina made the fabulous new 1230 machines available for symposium participants to use, I decided that I might as well use it as a test drive opportunity, and put it through most of its paces. I tried out all the fancy embroidery stitches in gold thread to cover all the seams of this contemporary crazy patchwork background. It took miles of thread, but the effect was great, and the embroidery functioned as the quilting. By the end of that workshop I was absolutely hooked on that machine, and on my return to Denver bought a demo-model from a dealer there. This is actually the second version of my design, and went to Visions early the following year. I didn’t publish it on my website until that 2013 post, as I always saw it as totally different in every way from work I have done before or since. So, what’s the scoop on this one?
The big snake figure is the Rainbow Serpent, the most important spirit to the indigenous Australian Aboriginal people. It oversees and controls all aspects of Life, and dominates the quilt’s design. Fortune/Luck is symbolized by the dice and the chequered game board that a number of tble games require. In the game of Snakes and Ladders(c) each player throws the dice and moves forward, moving even faster by ascending a ladder if he arrives at the foot of it. If the throw of the dice means that the player’s turn finishes on the snake’s head, that’s bad luck and he’s penalised by sliding down to the end of the snake’s tail – ie progresses backwards. The winner is the first player to reach the end of the 100 square course. Life is a mixture of the action of forces we don’t see or undrrstand, and sheer luck coupled with the ability of make the best use of opportunity when it appears in our lives.
Thanks to Lisa’s 2013 FB post,I realised that this work, “Life’s Rich Tapestry” marks the beginning of a recurrent theme in my quiltmaking that by then had prompted the “Ebb & Flow” quilts and all the “Tracks” quilts of the 2000s and 2010s. I began to see that both series of quilts were really connected, in different ways, to what had seemed an odd outlier, an abberant quilt design when I made it back in 1990. Just at that time I was entering a phase of using 1/2″ strip inserts, a technique which became a signature in my designs of the late 1990s and early 2000s, like Ora Banda, but I still hadn’t fully realised that a technique alone is not ‘art’.
Those strip inserts over time became much more curvy and eventually quite variable in width, and the phase lasted a long time really, up to around 2015. Eventually I began to focus less on the technical skill I’d developed and think more deeply about the meaning of my art. So, in the longer perspective, “Life’s Rich Tapestry” is important in understanding the role of remembered experience in my own artistic vision.
