Jan Zwicky - Poet and Philosopher

This week, more than usual, I've been thinking about the writing of poetry. The reason? I'm attending a weekend workshop (I had actually written wordshop, which is probably more appropriate) on the writing of poetry with Mark Tredinnick, and he asked us to send four poems, and in return, he sent us four of his. One of Mark's poems entitled, Partita, is dedicated to Jan Zwicky. Mark has recommended her poems before, so I decided to take a longer look. Now Mark is an essayist, writer, inspiring teacher and in essence, a philosopher as well, and looking at Jan Zwicky's biography and her poems, I can see why he has suggested I read her work.

I have added a link to her biography and a video from youtube, so you can decide for yourself whether you add her to your reading list, as I intend to mine.

Jan Zwicky - Poet and Philosopher 

So what, you may also ask, has this to with quilts?

A whole lot, is my answer. I've spend time this year thinking about

Fragments, Connections: a day in the life

1. Yesterday I bought a copy of the October issue of Art Monthly to read an article by Ruth Hadlow, The Library of Translation Exercises: dis/location and creative practice in West Timor (74-76). Within the library is Diary, a virtual book and available on the web, made in collaboration with designer Neal Haslem.
2. Also in this issue is a review by Chris Raja of The Donald Friend Diaries: Chronicles and Confessions of an Australian Artist edited by Ian Britain (82). I have a copy of the full version of the diaries that included Friend's time in Hill End, linked by my research into the work of Judy McDermott who spent time as artist-in-residence in Hill End in 1999, and again in 2000. Last month I attended an opening of Julie Ryder's exhibition, Companion Planting a series of works

Logs, Blogs, Journals & Quilts

Soon after I set up this blog I added a 'Blogbook' to record my thoughts and, if you've visited it recently, you'll know I spent two weeks in a ship travelling south along the Kamchatka Peninsula.
I have returned my mind full of thoughts about travelling by sea--ship's charts, logbooks (either digital or handwritten), I have the brief notes I made each night in my diary, the ship's chronicle published each morning and, a quilt I stitched each day (not that I had intended it as a record of the journey but it had become inexorably linked to the experience). The quilt is to be a gift for my nephew's young son: cloth purchased in New York, made in Japan (plus other cloth from my collection), machine pieced before I left, and I continue to stitch it on my return home as I think over the adventures we had along the way. I am stitching the names of animals in both English and Russian (owl, tiger, plus tree, flower, and my nephew's name and the names of his mother and father in Russian). And the quilt is an unexpected connection to my thoughts about recording of journeys. This morning I found a facsimile of part of James Cook's log on the NSW State Library website, and that's but a beginning.



The Ship's digital Log:
September 6 Gavrilla Bay
(not yet the Kamchatka Peninsula, we are still in
the Gulf of Anadyr, the Chukotka region of Far East Russia)

The Akademik Shokalskiy

A Real Pretend Wagga for Paul Klee

At the opening f the TSA conference in October last year, an invitation was extended to the audience to propose quilts to be added to the collection of the International Quilt Study Centre & Museum. Earlier this year a submission was sent detailing three quilts by Judy McDermott in response to this invitation.

I am excited to report that IQSC have selected A Real Pretend Wagga for Paul Klee (1997) to be part of their collection:

Judy McDermott: A Real Pretend Wagga for Paul Klee (1997)
82 x 122 cm
Wool/acrylic and wool fabrics, machine pieced and hand quilted with hand-dyed silk thread

In Judy's own words:

This quilt is all about colour. What to do with the ferocious orange from the op shop? Add greens, as did Paul Klee in his colour studies. The yellow "makes the orange sing", says Johannes Itten, author of The Art of Colour. A wagga is a traditional Australian quilt or bush blanket made from wheat bags, old clothes, or found scrap materials. Many are cobbled together, although my favourite is 'sewn' with wire.    

(Artist's statement, Quilt National 1999)

Horizontal lines are present in a number of Judy's quilts--in the 'Big House' series as prison bars, in the 'Quilting Hill End ' series as picket fences that

The Velvet Highway - Blankets of Wisdom by Luciano Ghersi

I have started to subscribe to fiberQuarterly  an on-line journal from Canada. The first (or 'my' first) issue contains an article: 'Blankets of Wisdom' by Luciano Ghersi. It includes the following photograph, one which immediately attracted my attention:

The article can be read as a whole via the link above, so I won't attempt to summarise it here. 

It touches on the emotional and haptic connections to the blanket (the quilt) as do the images and patterns used.

Inspirations#1 Julie Chen's Artists' Books

Julie Chen
'Personal Paradigms'  2003

The April/May issue of American Craft Magazine has arrived and it contains a story on Julie Chen and her extraordinary books, 'Read Between the Lines'.

I then found

Setting up a blog

I spent a morning helping a friend to set up a blog to use in her travels and that has given me an idea for series of posts on our recent visit to Rajasthan (January 2011).

The trip was an intense one--we moved location 13 times in 19 days and it has taken me three months to find a way in to the multiplicity of experiences we had.

A visit to 'Curious Colony'

Image from: When I grow up I want to be a forger (2010)

by

Joan Ross 

On Friday I visited the 'Curious Colony' exhibition now on at the SH Ervin Gallery until February 20. It was a review of this exhibition at the Newcastle Regional Art Gallery (10 July - 29 August 2010) that started me thinking about the Cabinet of Curiosities. I had missed seeing the exhibition in Newcastle but here was the opportunity to see the Newcastle Chest for myself, as well as the rest of the exhibition.
The Chest is fascinating, its contents as curious as should be, not only was I fascinated by