Quilted Out Of Space

Jan Zwicky - Poet and Philosopher

2011-11-01T11:49:00.002+11:00

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 just that subject. It was this time last year (also at a wordshop given by Mark) that I was introduced to the study of Prosody. I may have known about it from school but not given it a name, to quote Lewis Turco:

In order to write poetry, one must have some kind of language system, or prosody--a theory of poetry composition , or an organizing principle--within the bounds of which one can build the poem. Form, then, whether it be 'internal' and 'organic', or 'external' and formal', is of major importance. (The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics, 5).

Prosody is also a term used in linguistics as the internal structure of language--the sound of words in language.Utterance. The musicality of language—itspitch, loudness, and variation in syllable length.

I intend to write in greater depth on the links with quilts and processes of quiltmaking as I am intrigued by the possibility this emphasis on structure and (material) form. In writing this, I realise I have become overwhelmed with formal aspects of making poetry this year and yet, perhaps that's not a problem in and of itself as that's how I first came to quiltmaking. And the study of and the thinking about prosody has opened up my mind to poetry I already knew, or thought I knew, for many years: I had mentioned TS Elliot's poems, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, in a poem I was editing for this weekend, so I took my tattered copy of the Collected Poems off the bookshelf and looked at it again...its structure, the rhyming pattens Elliot uses and the extraordinary images...and now I'm lost for words but hoping they'll return.

Fragments, Connections: a day in the life

2011-10-26T11:36:00.000+11:00

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.
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 developed from Julie's time also as art-in-residence at Hill End,staying in Donald Friend's and Donald Campbell's cottage. The works are extraordinary, a number make reference to Friend's diaries--rose prickles (I think that's what Julie called them, pointing out that what we call 'rose thorns' are not, they are 'rose prickles') on paper to form texts.
Yesterday I was reading Ann Hamilton: An Inventory of Objects and came across her work Untitled (1992) made from book pages, the words covered by small stones. These reminded me (in form not content or intention) of Sue Lawty's work that I first saw at the V&A Museum, London (and have already referred to in this blog).
Finally, my bedtime reading last night was the catalogue of Edmund de Waal's exhibition, Signs & Wonders at the V&A Museum in 2009 (well, I'm hoping the exhibition is still on display as I intend to visit the museum early next year). His pots are undecorated, waiting as it were for inscription as his story, The Hare with Amber Eyes of a family collection of netsuke, which he uses to trace his family story. This small objects appear as characters in the narrative who participate in it and yet are untouched by it. The link I have made to the book is to a you-tube video of de Waal speaking about his book.

Logs, Blogs, Journals & Quilts

2011-10-25T12:00:00.000+11:00

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

2011-10-07T12:48:00.001+11:00

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 surround the miners' cottages in Hill End, and as a design feature as in this quilt and the number of others in which she experimented with colour.

The quilt contains a vertical line of printed text along its right hand edge:

This reads: ACRYL & BEMBERG MIXED DYED WOOLEN CLOTH 41" X 54 YDS WASHABLE RESIN FINISH MADE IN JAPAN.

The text was part of the original cloth and its inclusion in this quilt is an example of word-play and the many layers of meaning associated with Judy's work: here is a wagga, a term used for a typically Australian style of quilt, yet made up of cloth made in Japan. It will join and produce a lively dialogue with an older (and possibly 'original' and 'authentic' although one could debate it either way!) Australian wagga in the collection.

A Real Pretend Wagga for Paul Klee was selected for Quilt National in 1999.

The Velvet Highway - Blankets of Wisdom by Luciano Ghersi

2011-04-19T14:50:00.001+10:00

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 image s and patterns used.

Inspirations#1 Julie Chen's Artists' Books

2011-04-15T16:58:00.002+10:00

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 a video:

YouTube - KQED Spark - Julie Chen

Artists' Books fascinate me, whether they be limited editions of simple hand-stitched books or the more complex ones like those made by Julie Chen.

In a series of posts I plan to bring ideas together with the concept of 'inspiration'--images, artists, poets...whatever and whoever I encounter to add to a personal scrapbook of possibilities.

The Oxford Dictionary identifies the origin of the word 'inspiration' as being from Middle English (enspire) and related to 'divine guidance'. The Middle English word came from Latin, inspirare, 'to breathe or blow into'. As in the English inspiration can also be used to mean, 'the drawing in of breath'

...a space between spoken words or ideas.

Reference: American Craft Magazine April/May 2011, 34 - 39

Setting up a blog

2011-04-13T11:00:00.002+10:00

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'

2011-02-10T16:48:00.001+11:00

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

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 Maria Fernanda Cardoso's leaf insects and leaf butterflies (and they are 'real' although it's taken me awhile to decide that) and it was Lionel Bawden's Bower (2010) of carved sea creatures from coloured Staedtler pencils that I really enjoyed. I've seen Bawder's carved pencils before but they seem most effective within this, a wunderkammer.
And there was much more to see in the exhibition: some exquisite embroideries by Narelle Jubelin, Origins and originality (1998).
This land, its flora, its fauna, its stories hold as great a fascination in the twenty first century as in the nineteenth and this exhibition celebrates this. And yes, there are connections too with this project--Emma Rowden's quilt and Pamela Fitzsimon's work, as well as within and between the postings that make up this blog.

Catalog: "Curious Colony: A twenty first century Wunderkammer" curated by Lisa Slade, published by Newcastle Regional Art Gallery (2010)
Image: downloaded from Sh Ervin Gallery website

All Best Wishes for 2011!

2010-12-29T18:19:00.001+11:00

Does the Art Quilt exist?

2010-12-29T18:18:00.000+11:00

As we continue to use lines to divide ourselves into parts, we lose a sense of the whole. We tend to forget that even as lines divide, they also connect. While we so readily express our differences, let us also acknowledge our common humanity." (source: Kim Schmahmann)

Since I first started to research quilts, I have had a problem with the use of the term, 'art quilt' to identify a separate category of layered and stitched textiles that fall within the broader category of quilts.

As a starting point I would like to suggest that there is not such category and draw attention to

two exhibitions at the International Quilt Study Center & Museum:

Quilts In Common was the opening exhibition for the IQSC in 2008. As the curators It took a unique approach to the quilts by making connections between the various quilts in terms of individual marks, design, shape, technique, symbolism and by displaying the quilts alongside other objects.

The second was South Asian Seams, an exhibition of quilts from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. I had the opportunity to see this exhibition for myself at the Textile Society of America conference in Lincoln, Nebraska this October--the quilts were vibrant and completely in context within the gallery context.

I intend to explore this issue in future Posts--and would appreciate any comments on the topic!

Evolution or Revolution?

2010-12-09T17:26:00.000+11:00

A friend asked if I'd seen the program Virtual Revolution, aired recently on the ABC. I hadn't and she sent me the link. It looks very interesting. I shall be exploring it in more detail (and there's innovative ways of doing this on the website, it's called the 3-D Explorer).

A flying lesson

2010-11-15T17:23:00.005+11:00

A Frogmouth owl mother and her chick have taken up residence on the tree outside my studio window. As I started taking these photographs, the adult started bobbing and stretching first one wing then the other then, to our amazement, the chick mimicked the adult's movements.

Could this be the first lesson in learning to fly?

As I write I can see the adult owl still sitting within the crook of the tree. It is pouring with rain.

We have a number of owls in our area: the Boobook, Frogmouth, Powerful, Barking and even a Sooty Owl which perched outside the dining room window one November night. Generally we recognize each by their call: the Boobook with its two syllables which make up its name, the Frogmouth's meditative 'oom' , the Sooty Owl's descending whistle. Most often the call of the Barking Owl is also linked to its name and is something between a cough and a dog's bark, then at others ti can be can be altogether different.

One night I awoke to such a scream of such terror, I was convinced murder was taking place beneath my window. Again and again someone called out in pain and fear—I vowed if I heard it once more and I would go and investigate—yet lingered, too fearful to discover just what was happening. Then, as the air vibrated once again with the violence, I crept down the stairs, broom handle at the ready.

But there was nothing.

No sign of distress or evidence of a crime having taken place.

I stood in the starlight, the trees stood around me.

Next morning I reached for the bird book along with my cup of tea, determined to find some explanation which did not reside solely within my imagination. Sitting up in bed, the missive What Bird is That? open and resting on my knees, I discover my night visitor to have been a Barking Owl and capable of:

…appalling nocturnal screams—calls which have given name to the local names Screaming-woman Bird and Murderbird.

Object 4 of 26: Owl Thimble
4 x 3 cm, wood

My description of the Boobook's call comes from the last line of a poem by Mark Tredinnick, 'The Lyrebird':

"Boobook at midnight: if those are your only two syllables, you'd make them pay".

Quilted Out Of Space: Postcards from Lincoln

2010-10-27T11:28:00.003+11:00

Quilted Out Of Space: Postcards from Lincoln : first some images--we intentionally arrived four days before the conference started and spent our time walking around the streets of Lincoln getting a feel for the place. Our focus each days (and all the days we were there) was the train station. The long goods trains were continually passing through, travelling slowly and sounding their low mournful horn (day and night). We also soon discovered and frequented the 'Indigo Bridge Cafe'--the best coffee in town! Also a bookshop and staffed by students, it also has a fantastic atmosphere.

Postcards from Lincoln

2010-10-27T11:20:00.000+11:00

Indigo Bridge Cafe & Bookshop
(the best coffee in town)

The Train Station, Lincoln Nebraska

'On' and 'another' matter

2010-09-22T17:41:00.000+10:00

Postcard #3
(From Postcards from a Past'2003)
by the author

I can’t remember the sandpit but there is a photograph of me playing in it, left hand held high as I run towards the camera. Look at this, a daisy-chain, a fairy-chain, a strand of time.
Mention sand and I think of another time years later. Lying on my back staring up into the night; the sound of waves in the dark stars above: stars upon stars upon stars drawing ever upwards dissolving boundaries pondering the possibility of endlessness. There are shapes and pattens within the constellations but I do not countenance identification it tells me nothing of the possibilities above me as I lie in the still-warm slight-damp sand. I struggle to comprehend impose meaning while considering the possibility none is possible.
Infinity offers no explanation. It attempts to label the unnameable, beyond number beyond limit beyond being and by doing so ends up by limiting itself. It is labelling the known unknown (which in the act of naming must itself become known, it is the unknown unknown the other possibilities which lie beyond the horizon of knowing which draw me).
The universe may be considered a fabric of reality knitted together in dark matter he tells me. The stars are visible points formed of light matter, dropped stitches within the dark cloth, loose networks of filaments stretching across time and space. Knit one purl one knit one purl one a binary code in repetition which shifts evolves in errors the hesitation dropped rhythm of stitch. Chaos theory string theory or loop quantum theory with space and time made of coiled ribbons, once tangled become particles. The many strands of time entangled enfolded envelope me.
It is this repetition of stitch and not the single stitch itself which offers consolation. The knitted stitch, one needle through the stitch on the other, strand forward and looped around the needle, stitch pulled through. Knit stitch, purl stitch, increase, decrease, cast off but not the universe.

(From 26 Object Project, 2008)

The arrival of Edgar Levensen's paper, 'The Enigma of the Unconscious' (2001) last Wednesday provided that leap of understanding that perhaps, just perhaps, the questions I had been asking early in this project about 'space' and within that the void and more recently the workings of 'smooth' space could be answered by the notion of 'hyperspace'.

Levensen's paper is about the unconscious, and the role of the analyst in the process of treatment yet I believe he manages to open up all sorts of intriguing ideas which include D&G's concept of 'smooth space'. He states;

"Conscious thinking follows the rules of Greek logic--deduction, categorizing, inferring--our Western cultural heritage. [a form of 'striated space']. In contrast, unconscious thinking seems closer to free-ranging hypertext...where words and concepts are pursued to their most unexpected implications ['smooth space']. (p247--my emphases)

The resulting text he points out, '...is a self-regenerating process'. Levensen then goes on to state:

I think the brain is individual but mind is a field phenomenon, a network, a web. (p250--my emphasis)

It is that glimpse of possibility that the use of 'smooth space' can be helpful in generating new ways of seeing, new ways of hearing. An interactive 'cabinet of curiousity'

It's midnight in the garden

2010-09-10T10:33:00.001+10:00

Midnight in the Garden of Academe (2004)

Judy McDermott

102 x 76 cm

Silk. Cotton Batting. Machine quilted with cotton thread.

Knots are hand-dyed silk.

Completed in 2004, Midnight in the Garden of Academe was exhibited first in the US and then in Germany after Judy's death in 2005. I didn't have the opportunity to discuss this quilt with Judy but her husband told me that just as A Real Pretend Wagga for Paul Klee (1998)--selected for 'Quilt National' in 1999--was all about 'colour', Midnight in the Garden of Academe was all about 'texture'.

(detail)

The titles of Judy's works are important, even if it is now up to us to decode them the best way we can. She loved language--puns, double meanings, to cross-reference her quilts to poetry, to literature. Some, like Clap Hands Here Comes Charlie (2002) were named after a song title which she told me she had heard on the radio after the song itself had been played...Judy's daughter explained that Love Will Nail You to the Cross (1995-1997) was also named after a song: 'Nail You to the Cross' by John Ewbank. I have a recording of Jeannie Lewis made in 1995 ('Tango Australis', Sole Music). The words and music are powerful, the message hard-hitting, it's message of inevitability:

"Love's going to nail you to the cross/Love's going to nail you to the cross/It'll go right through you/It'll flatter and fool you/It'll do you good and nail you to the cross."

And the quilt itself takes that message even further: it is the private made public, looking being made visible, the quilt can both reveal and conceal, it is reversible (the narratives to be understood from both sides), it enfolds. To work with Judy's quilts is to continually uncover alternative meaning, uncover new stories.

The art quilt as a medium of expression draws on the tradition of the utilitarian quilt and, as such, is associated with home and family. Placing the quilt within the gallery allows these conventional narratives to be re-assessed and the opportunity for other, even 'hidden' meanings to emerge.

Wonder (4): connections--the cabinet, the blog

2010-09-08T15:00:00.000+10:00

Bureau of Bureaucracy (1993-99)
by
Kim Schmahmann
various wood veneers & hardwoods, mother of pearl,
gold leaf & brass

I saw this cabinet of curiosities ('...of Bureaucracy') in the Renwick Gallery Washington DC when I visited in 2007.

Made by Kim Schmahmann, the workmanship is exquisite, personal yet universal--the lower drawers contain Schmahmann's birth certificate, marriage certificate and death certificate (not yet filled out).

(detail)

The more I think about it, the more connections I can find between such cabinets, the blog and the quilts. And returning to the Macquarie Chest, these become quite specific:

Lost birds: the bird depicted (or 'noticeably' absent) from this series of small quilts is the Glossy Black Cockatoo. These are becoming increasing uncommon due to the felling of their food source, the casuarina (she-oak, or Botany Bay wood) tree. Identified by the early colonists as being particularly good for making furniture, it was used to make a number of the early cabinets used to store scientific collections. The Macquarie Chest, however, is made from Australian Red Cedar and Australian Rosewood (rose mahogany) both found in the Lower Hunter district (of NSW) but now quite uncommon due to their early popularity. The Red Cedar and Turpentine trees on the property where Pamela now lives was felled in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The logs were brought out along snig tracks that form the basis of many of the walkways today.
It was the convicts, transported from England, who worked the lumber yards in the early days of the colony, among these were cabinet-makers who also took on private commissions such as the Macquarie Chest. (A connection to the 'Big House' series).
The Callan Park estate was first settled by John Ryan Brenan who arrived in Sydney in 1834, only thirteen years after Macquarie's time as Governor of NSW ended.
It is their 'secret' histories that make these objects so intriguing--the personal details of the collector's life, the reasons behind the selections that make up the collection and, what has happened to the object in the years since. Each of these quilts bring to light histories of various kinds--of a particular site (the Gorge, Callan Park), of the 'others' in society (the mentally ill, those who have broken the law) and even the quilt itself, too often overlooked as a medium of personal expression and work of art.

As I write this and search for even more connections (feeling certain there are some). I realise the obvious-- it is not the works themselves which are making the connections but my own mind. Just I choose the individual pieces of cloth to make a quilt, I am making connections and putting together stories that link the three quilts which make up this project. Thus a 'cabinet of curiosities' can be a metaphor for the mind, and this blog becomes a reflection of the way mine works...a performance of 'smooth thinking' (see my Post, 'Smooth Thought' dated January 19 this year).

When I looked around Kim Schmahmann's website, I noticed the following statement and perhaps I shall use it as an epigraph to this project:

"We have become a planet filled with lines, lines that have become essential to our existence. We are so dependent on these lines we cannot imagine a world without them. We use lines to create countries, towns, time zones, production lines and deadlines. We live and die by these lines, and yet none of these lines exist except in our imaginations and through our actions. That is the power of lines.

As we continue to use lines to divide ourselves into parts, we lose a sense of the whole. We tend to forget that even as lines divide, they also connect. While we so readily express our differences, let us also acknowledge our common humanity." (source)

Notes:
Elizabeth Ellis, 'Rare & Curious'--for details of the Macquarie Chest

Wonder (3)--a response & more thoughts

2010-09-02T12:35:00.000+10:00

I'm writing this in response to Ruth's comments to my Post, 'Wunderkammer/Wundernet' (August 28). Ruth asked certain questions which have helped me clarify my thoughts and the reasons why I made the link between Pamela's Lost birds series and the wunderkammer/cabinet of curiosities and here are some of my answers:

When I opened the 'Spectrum' section of the week-end Sydney Morning Herald at John McDonald's review of Curious Colony, it was the image of the open Newcastle Chest that caught my eye--in the centre of which was Louise Weaver's Area (2010):

Louise Weaver: Melbourne-based artist Louise Weaver has responded to the Macquarie chest’s drawers and trays of taxidermied birds. Weaver’s drawer installation includes a native budgerigar, a zebra finch and a rainbow lorikeet, united by a wreath of wattle made from crocheted handblown-glass orbs. Weaver’s birds are ‘taxidermied from the outside’. Mummified in brightly coloured crotchet, they call into question our historical treatment of nature and our frenzied collecting and museumising.

Louise Weaver Arena 2010

hand-crocheted lambswool over taxidermied

zebra finch (Poephila guttata), budgerigar

(Melopsittacus undulatus), rainbow lorikeet

(Trichoglossus haematodus), hand-blown glass,

wooden beads, cotton embroidery thread, gold

leaf and mono filament, 8.2 x 47.0 x 36.0 cm

Photography by Mark Ashkanasy

courtesy the artist and Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney

^{[Image and text down loaded from the Newcastle Regional Art Gallery's website, 1/9/2010]}

That 'leap of connection with Pamela's Lost birds series was initially probably figurative, a visual connection with the subject matter (birds) but then I believe it goes deeper than that--it's that sense of the 'unexpected'and 'wonder' that I feel with both Pamela's and Louise Weaver's works
And yes, the wunderkammer as an object intrigues me too, that sense of discovery. And yet I also associate it with a sense of 'loss'--and this is where early memories come in
Memories of the museums from my childhood...the taxidermied animals, often rare, sometimes extinct; various bits and pieces, sometimes whole organisms, preserved in formaldehyde, the fusty bottles/jars carefully labelled in copper script handwriting. These museums were very different from the museums of today, they often had poor lighting and crowded shelves [I had already made this connection when I asked Pamela if I could use her Lost Birds in this project]
my own boxes of objects precious--related through their perceived value to me personally rather than to each other. And as Helmut Lueckenhausen (quoting Milhaly Csikszentmihalyi) points out:

"These patterns, and many of the others that emerged from the data [his research], suggest that (at least in our culture and in the present historical period) objects do not create order in the viewer's mind by embodying principles of visual order; they do so by helping the viewer struggle for the ordering of his or her own experience." (p36)

This also leads on to a point I touched on in an earlier post. I believe the Lost birds series is different to other work by Pamela in certain ways:

it contains figurative references (albeit silhouettes, chalk outlines of a body at the scene of a crime)
while it, as her other work, is linked to a profound sense of place (the Bow Wow Gorge) and the process of time, it is a of a more recent 'time' (even to the present, the glossy black cockatoo is still around, if uncommon) than many of her other works which reference the Permian, a period in the earth's history 245-360 million years ago . It connects to the scientific work Pamela does as a conservationist; Pamela keeps a journal which documents the plant and bird species, and records rainfall as she returns most days to explore the creek, caves and ridges.

Lost birds #4 (2006/7)

Pamela Fitzsimons

[scanned image]

^{Another work by Pamela Fitzsimons:}

Rock fissures (2005)

77 x 85 cm

plant dyed wool, layered and hand stitched

^{I find the nature (or essence) of 'wonder' in and of itself most difficult to put into words...it is an encounter which surprises in its 'unexpected', if not in it's completely 'unknown' nature.}

^{[During the writing of this post, I have realised another coincidental connection with Yann Mantel's book, 'Beatrice and Virgil'--the main character, a writer called 'Henry' meets another character, also called 'Henry' (interesting 'doubling' here) who is a taxidermist. 'Beatrice' a donkey and, 'Virgil' a howler monkey are both taxidermied animals: Post August 8, Blogbook August 2]}

Spring is on it's way!

2010-08-29T13:50:00.002+10:00

This is a pot of lavender outside my studio, if you look carefully you might find a bee on one of the flowers. They have arrived only in the past few days. Spring starts officially on Wednesday--the first of September. It's been a cold winter and today still feels cold but the sun is shining! (We've had a lot of rain, we use the rain off the roof--our only water supply, so are very aware of the amount of rain that falls. The plants also show how much rain we've been having).
I have included this as my studio was the inspiration for the name of this blog (as I pointed out in one of the first Posts). The plants growing in pots which I pass on my way from the house to my studio are an ongoing source of inspiration.

Wunderkammer/Wundernet

2010-08-26T18:12:00.002+10:00

After working on the previous Post, Wunderkammer/Lost birds, I suddenly thought of a blog which could function in a similar way--the Pages and hyper-links opening up (as a drawer of a cabinet might) to reveal an object, image or text of wonder and curiosity. It was soon after that I recalled a work by Anna Munster, artist and writer, Wnndernet--a set of four ' virtual' and interactive Cabinets of Curiosities or Wunderkammers.

Uploaded onto the Internet in 2000, Wnndernet invites the participant to explore of series of links initially classified into four main categories (which I have called 'cabinets' as clicking on the link brings one first to such an image) of exotica, historica, machina, and transgenica. From there one is drawn through a series of hyper-links to image, sound, text and site, 'within' and 'out with' Wundernet itself. Even the visuals are combinations of the visceral (flesh and bones), the valuable (collectible objects) and the virtual (mathematical symbols). The fragments of text lead one on to the the complete (and downloadable) original text. Melding art and science, fact and fantasy, and philosophical theory, the ideas from the (potentially) finite content are open to (possibly) infinite variation and rearrangement. However tempting it is to view one as the digital version of the physical object 'other', both which make connection-in-difference (and therein are of such interest to this project and its exploration of the notion of 'smooth' space), there are differences between the physical Wnderkammer and the virtual Wundernet, as Marsha Meskimmon points out:

Based on the Wunderkammer, its visual tropes, structural logic and reliance upon collection and display as navigational propositions, are from the first a knowing projection of the past into the present. However, the connections between the digital Wundernet and the Wunderkammer are meant to produce a gap, an interval, through which their constitutive difference enables us to make experimental, conceptual leaps in thinking. (p122)

And what I am calling 'smooth space'...

Marsha Meskimmon, Women Making Art (2003)

Reconfiguring the Wall (2006) detail
by
Emma Riwden

The research material Emma gathered could have been pieced/re-pieced in any number of ways and the connections made lead to a number of conclusions...

The Wunderkammer & The Lost Birds Series

2010-08-25T12:08:00.003+10:00

The history of the sheer magical existence of the previously unimagined and the evolution of curiosity into a quest for understanding are in part the history of our material culture. (Helmut Lueckenhausen, p30)

Writing in the week-end edition of The Sydney Morning Herald ( August 7-8, 2010), John McDonald describes The Newcastle Chest which was commissioned for an exhibition at the Newcastle Regional Gallery's exhibition, Curious Colony: A 21st Century Wunderkammer.

The Newcastle Chest sits at the centre of this exhibition which mixes the work of the early colonial artists with the contemporary. The Chest itself refers to an earlier one--Governor Macquarie's Collectors' Chest , now held in the Sate Library of NSW but considered too fragile to travel to Newcastle for their exhibition.

Popular around the 16th and 17th centuries, the 'Cabinet of Curiosity' (Wunderkammer) was often made for a number of reasons--naturalia (to contain specimens of rare plants), exotica (possession of other cultures), or artefacta (to contain art works).

Helmut Lueckenhausen goes on to explain:

The Wunderkammer systematised its contents by the very fact of its existence. No matter how diverse or seemingly unrelated the parts, the physical fact of their being brought together turned the furniture [ie the cabinet] into a rationalising and probably even unifying structure. (p36)

The Lost birds #1
(scanned image)

In size (approx. 20 x20 cm), the eight panels of the Lost birds series (2006/7) by Pamela Fitzsimons. would fit into such a Cabinet of Curiosity. And as such, they fulfill each of Lueckenhausen's categories:

Naturalia: depicting the Glossy Black Cockatoo (Calyptorhynhus lathami) would have been seen regularly by the early colonialists but are now uncommon due to the clearing of woodland and particularly of the casuarinas, which form this cockatoo's source of food . Pamela is both artist and environmentalist; her work is informed by her love for the land, and: "...patterns, colours, textures, changing shapes, and nature's cycles are recurring themes".
Exotica: this cockatoo would have appeared strange and exotic to the first settlers, its 'massive bulbous bill' and strange whining call would have made it a subject of curiosity. Unfortunately its now 'uncommon' status means it is become increasingly 'exotic' and potentially endangered.
Artefacta: Pamela's work is informed by the landscape in which she lives--she explains: "Walking through the landscape, observing birds and animals, listening, thinking and meditating in the bush all provide inspiration". The colours of the plant-dyed and coloured silks and the intensity of the hand stitching make her works objects of wonder.

Helmut Lueckenhausen, 'Wonder and despite: craft and design in museum history' in, 'Craft and Contemporary Theory' Sue Rowley (ed)
Pamela Fitzsimons, artist's statement from the catalog to the exhibition, Changing Places Lake Macquarie City Art Gallery (2007)

Tea-towels

2010-08-18T19:19:00.001+10:00

Textile Fibre Forum arrived in my postbox yesterday. As I opened it, images of tea-towels pegged to a line extending toward the horizon at sunrise sprung off the page. This was Windwash, an installation of 201 hand-printed tea-cloths hung across the surface of Lake George (Weereewa) north east of Canberra, in March 2010.

[And I've found the link to the full article (click here) and you'll see what I mean!]

The installation was organised by Megalo Print Studio + Gallery as part of the Weereewa Festival this year. The theme, 'Winds of Change' referred to the new wind farm on the low hills that form the eastern edge of the lake, and now a feature of the journey between Sydney and Canberra.

The humble tea-towel, like the quilt can be used in unexpected ways ...I'm a fan of the Third Drawer Down company, as well as a collector of tea-towels .

Washing lines hold a fascination for a number of textile artists I know. They've told me stories of hanging the washing in groups of the same colour and show images of washing lines from their travels when they talk about their work. I particularly like to hang out cloth fresh from the dye pot and watch the colour and patterns emerge as it dries in the wind.

Plant-dyed Cloth for Reconfiguring the Wall on the Hills Hoist (2006)

More plant-dyed cloth for Reconfiguring the Wall (2006)

Textile Fibre Forum, issue 3, No. 99 2010

Sue Lawty: World Beach Project

2010-08-18T12:40:00.001+10:00

I saw Sue Lawty's exhibition at the V&A London five years ago. I have followed her blog for some time. AS well as landscape, I find her work has an unresistable connection with language. Her 'World Beach Project' connects the virtual with the physical.

The virtual curator in smooth space

2010-08-17T14:37:00.001+10:00

Glenn Adamson, writing in American Craft (August/September 2010) points out how Google provides a powerful tool to the curator, as:

"...no curator can hope to keep up with the facts and contacts that Google produces. More and more, curators aren't so much those in the know; they are professionals who shape what we know already (or can know at a moment's notice)."(p66)

He names a number of exhibition where artists have used Google as a tool to form:

"...intuitive associations: connections ranging from the purely visual to the merely coincidental to the positively conspiratorial."

These are exhibitions at actual locations: the Hayward Gallery, the Tate Modern. The Russian Linesman by Mark Wallinger explored borders and thresholds, and the condition of liminality and included a range of objects from museum collections as well as from websites, such as YouTube. Wallinger developed this show by searching the internet.

It seems to me that these exhibitions are curated using 'smooth space', a curatorial method that allows art not to be limited by its materiality nor the dogma of definitions which attempt to corral works into specific categories such as craft and, thus the unexpected to happen--an opportunity to open up new ways of perceiving rather than to restrict oneself to those that have been before.

Adamson, Glenn: Google Curates, American Craft August/September 2010, 66-7

Found! A quilted out of space quilt

2010-08-16T09:42:00.003+10:00

I found a copy of Robert Shaw's 'American Quilts: The Democratic Art, 1780 - 2007' in a local bookshop and, opening it at random came across The Solar System Quilt made by Ellen Harding Baker in 1876 and now in the Smithsonian Museum.

It connects with many of the questions I asked earlier on and the art works I referred to.

The Solar System Quilt (1876)
by
Ellen Harding Baker
(Smithsonian Museum)

Post: Archiving the wall

2010-08-13T19:04:00.000+10:00

Friday, August 13 2010: Reconfiguring the wall

Casting the net

2010-08-12T17:07:00.003+10:00

"...finally he found it where he should have looked first, on the Internet, which is a net indeed, one that can be cast farther then the eye can see and be retrieved no matter how heavy the haul, its magical mesh never breaking under the strain but always bringing in the most amazing catch...and there, in four tenths of a second, he had his answer." (Yann Mantel, Beatrice and Virgil, 2010, 170)

In a recent issue of 'Abbey's Advocate'--a newsletter from Abbey's Bookshop in Sydney, I noticed a new book, The Shallows: How the Internet is Changing the Way We Think, Read and Remember by Nicholas Carr. At first glance it seemed to pick up on the concern about the effect the digital could impact on the future of books as an object. But it appears to go further than that and argue that our use of the internet may be even be changing the very structure of our brains--internet search tools allow us to gather large amounts of nonlinear information from multiple sources very quickly but we risk losing our capacity for concentration, contemplation and reflection as our process of analyzing information is moving form "...the depths to the shallows" (#248).

This morning when taking a look at Arts & Letters Daily I came across a link to an article to The art of slow reading which in addition to referring to Nicholas Carr's book, added comments from a number of academics in support of this view. The solution? Take time out for some 'slow reading' and re-reading of they call 'physical' texts. [And for the slow art of quiltmaking...]

The structure of the mind and the internet also came up in a conversation a week or so back. We were discussing the internet and the suggestion was that the structure of the internet reflects the structure of our unconscious and explains how the experience of 'surfing the net' can elicit unexpected results and connections, just as ideas can come to mind from where we know not.

Cho'akpo for a Child Bride (2002) 150 x 150 cm, by Sarah Tucker (image: Fleur Shelton)

When I returned to my notes made at the beginning of this project (handwritten in a notebook I keep, if less regularly since I have been writing this blog) and I found a list of characteristics of Deleuze and Guattarri's 'smooth space': limitless, without distinction and linked with the unconscious.

Cho'akpo for a Child Bride 2002 (detail of installation, image Nick Tucker)

And so what implications does this have for this project?

I find each post is triggered by an idea/comment/image and as I write I find associations emerge which I can document via links (hyper-links) as I go, illustrating my text with images or by making connections with other texts I have found during the process of writing. The result, this weblog, is most like a lab book I might use to describe an experiment and record results, with any notes I make along the way. So I do not intend it to be an end in itself but something, I hope, which will lead to something else completely. Writing which will exist in the physical world as well as in the virtual.

That In-Between Space

2010-08-10T17:44:00.000+10:00

Pamela Fitzsimons, Extinction wrap 2007

3 panels, each 110 x 150 am, machine and hand-stitched plant-dyed silk

And so what of the in-between space?

Mog Bremner's Cot Quilt For A Baby, Not Yet Born captures that moment just before a quilt comes together. While its surface design is based on an alternating nine-patch--a readily recognizable and traditional quilt block design--the layers hang separate from each other yet joined by threads which link one layer with the others. A structure which suggests a continual and on-going such sequence of events that is, '...an unique instant of production in a continual flow of changes evident in the cosmos' (DD, 22).

In the artist's words:

This quilt is a metaphor for an unborn baby, a potential living person. The structure is recognisable but not yet complete, and the intertwined complexity of the developing self has already begun. Imagination creates the solidity of a possible reality. (Artist's statement, catalog for 'The New Quilt 2010')

That in-between space, between self and other, a shifting space...that of performance, and also where self becomes other--a hybrid space which Homi K Bhabha calls 'The Third Space' where we may: '...emerge as the others of ourselves'.

Notes:

A quilt is usually defined: '...as a layered stitched textile with at least two distinct layers bound together by stitches throughout the piece'. It is a label attached to a work by the artist, thus some works may be stitched and layered but not quilts, while in others the layers may be metaphorical and linked by narrative.

This definition is taken from the entry form for 'The New Quilt 2010': a juried exhibition of twenty-six 'contemporary quilt textiles' curated by Dianne Firth and held at th Manly Art Gallery & Museum, June 18 - July 25 2010

Mog Bremner's Cot Quilt for a Baby, Not Yet Born was selected for this exhibition. Unfortunately, no image is available

Homi K Bhaba quoted in Mersha Meskimmon, 'Woman Making Art', p150

Interview with Author Yann Martel

2010-08-02T21:14:00.001+10:00

I have added this interview with Yann Mantel having just finished his most recent book, 'Virgil and Beatrice' (see my 'Blogbook' entry for today). The interview concerns his earlier book 'Life of Pi' but raises some interesting questions for me as a writer (and as a reader too!). I feel as if he threads a fine line between fiction and non-fiction (or does he? he certainly does for me as a reader).

'Beatrice and Virgil' is a book that has left me both shocked and deeply thoughtful. A play within a story on confronting issues.

I haven't commented on books I've been reading until this post...this time I felt I had to! And while I'm on the subject, I've also recently finished 'Stitches' a graphic novel (not about stitching!). Interestingly the most recent newsletter from the NSW Writers' Centre starts with an article on the Graphic Novel.

I'm keeping a list of (non-reference) books I've read in the lower left corner of this blog ('Books 2010'). I am forever open to comments suggestions! And the references I've used are listed under 'Bibliography'. Comments/suggestions also much appreciated!

New Posts: Listen...& Journal of a Madman

2010-07-29T16:04:00.000+10:00

Two recent posts in my associated blog, Reconfiguring the Wall:

Listen...July 19
Journal of a Madman, July 20

New Posting: The Big House

2010-07-19T12:00:00.000+10:00

How to establish links between the four blogs sites that form the basis of this project?
I set up the three additional blogs: 'The Big House', 'About Time' and, 'Reconfiguring The Wall' because I was finding the process of writing a blog all too linear. In additional my first blog, Quilted Out Of Space felt as if it was becoming more of a personal journal and I decided to set up the additional blogs to focus on the individual works I had chosen for this project.
(These blogs can be reached by clicking on the link to each under 'Associated Blogs' in the top right of this blog.)
Now, in order to strengthen connections between the associated blogs, I will list postings as I write them to take visitors from this blog to the latest post on another, thereby strengthening the connections between all four.
Well, that's my intention!

See 'Restorative Justice' July 15: The Big House

Judy McDermott, The Big House: Go To Gaol (diptych) 1995-98

#2 75x110cm, #1 100x60cm

(Photograph A Payne)

Fragments: The material and the virtual

2010-07-06T15:21:00.000+10:00

Some fragments, out-of-order but somehow related within the experience of blogging, that nagging question--what am I going here, and what is the blog anyway? Not only am I questioning the form (and already inferring materiality here, when a blog is situated within the internet somewhere in cyberspace) but keep finding the language itself keeps breaking down as I struggle to work out differences between the material and the virtual...I had thought it would be easy but it's not.

a short article in the Australian newspaper on May 13, One click from blog to blah, blah, blah, written by 'Susan Wyndham (Literary Editor)'. She quotes Cate Kennedy (author of The World Beneath) who '...fears our addition to the internet is killing literature'. Kennedy maintains fiction requires '...quiet, slow reflection by writers and readers' and I'd agree but I can't see how the internet/blog in particular can compete with literature or even with the notebook (for the latter's convenience in time and place...my internet connection failed yesterday when I planned to work on this post, so instead I put my ideas in my notebook, or rather the one of the many of notebooks that happened to be on my desk at that moment). Should I be worried? Will my writing process be damaged beyond repair?
I spent a day at the Sydney Writers' Festival and noticed a number of session on the effect of what is termed, 'The Digital Age'. James Stuart opened the session 'Beyond The Book' by speaking about the 'materiality of language' and his work 'The Material Poem' an anthology (Stuart is the editor) concerned with 'the material' but available on-line, so not totally committed to it...or is it?
16th Tamworth Fibre Textile Biennial, a matter of time includes a work by Andrew Nicholls --an image of a piece of cloth projected onto the gallery wall, Time After Time (2004 - 2006), the only piece in the exhibition to have no material form
A visit to the Twelve By Twelve exhibition which opened at the Gosford Regional Gallery at the beginning of June. This is an (ongoing) collaborative project by twelve quiltmakers who communicate via their blog to produce a series of twelve inch square quilts on a given theme. The first series (twelve of the themes) is now a touring exhibition. An example of the virtual (the members are scattered around the globe, no one member knows all the others) becoming material...
Recent visit to the Accademia in Florence and the series of unfinished sculptures by Michelangelo, the Prisoners the sculptures themselves seem to struggle to free themselves from the marble blocks from which they are made...these take me away from the argument surrounding the blog and to something altogether more fundamental, and that is that the virtual and the material are related through language and the process of creativity...the one preceding the other in the process of making.

Post stared on June 5 and completed on July 6 2010 [a three week visit to Europe inbetween!]

Where am I?

2010-05-20T12:11:00.000+10:00

I started this project in response to a call for abstracts for the next conference of the Textile Society of America, Textiles & Settlement: From Plains Space to Cyberspace. I saw this as an opportunity to investigate the quilt medium from a different angle.

I have chosen three quilts by three Australian quiltmakers: Love Will Nail You To The Cross (1995-1997) by Judy McDermott, The Lost Bird Series (2006) by Pamela Fitzsimons and, Reconfiguring The Wall (2006) by Emma Rowden.
Each of these quilts is associated with a specific site: 'Long Bay Gaol' (Sydney NSW), the Bow Wow Gorge (lower Hunter Valley, NSW) and, 'Callan Park Hospital for the Insane' (now, 'Sydney College for the Arts', Sydney NSW). For this study each quilt is also linked with a blog site: The Big House, About Time and, Reconfiguring The Wall. Three blogs which are are stand-alone but also linked to each other and to this, the original blog set up for this project.

Just as I have chosen specific quilts by three quiltmakers, I am focusing on Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari's theory of 'Smooth Space' outlined in their book, A Thousand Plateaus. Their theory prefigured but can also be used to describe the structure of the internet (boundless,without distinctions, blurs differences, rhizomatic, connective, open ended, generative).

Thus the use of the internet is also fundamental to this project. D & G use the patchwork quilt as an illustration of their theory of smooth space, so my question is not: does the structure of the quilt resemble smooth space? but can their ideas open up other spaces for conceptualizing the quilt and the processes of quiltmaking? And testing this through the use of the process of blogging.

I see myself not as objective observer but as an active participant in this project. It is for this reason I have framed the project in terms of 'performance': a 'frame' that is not fixed but shifts - more conversation than statement - just as this blog seeks to open up other connections rather than arrive at a definitive answer.

Images: (Top) Love Will Nail You To The Cross (1995-1997) photographer A Payne
(Middle) The Lost Bird Series (2006) photographer D Barnes
(Bottom) Reconfiguring The Wall (2006) Photographer E Rowden

So Be It

2010-05-07T11:52:00.000+10:00

This morning I opened Robert Dessaix's book, Arabesques, (at random) and came across this quote on page 255:

...I've made up my mind to write at random. It's not an easy undertaking because the pen (it's a fountain pen) lags behind my thoughts. Now, it's vital not to foresee what one is about to say, that's true. But there is always a bit of play-acting in it..If I feel like contradicting myself, I shall without a qualm. I won't strive for 'coherence'. But I won't affect incoherence either. Hidden away beyond logic is a way of thinking that is more important to me at this point...I aim to amuse myself here...Perhaps at this age it's permissible to let oneself go a bit. Amen. (Which means, I believe: so be it!)

Andre Gide, on the first page of his last book,

So Be It or The Chips are Down.

Siri Hustvedt explored this process in detail in her recent book, The Shaking Woman (she doesn't mention Andre Gide!) and I've come across it described by other writers too. I've tried it myself and it's not easy, my internal critic interrupts me again and again (I can only attempt it if I tell myself it's writing not to be read by anyone else, illogical but that's how it is).

I sense this process at work when I read Thousand Plateaus. perhaps I could call it in Deleuze & Guatarri's terminology: 'nomadic writing' (or perhaps 'haptic writing' but personally I like 'nomadic' better). And perhaps also when I read Helene Cixous --writing I love best to listen to.
Maybe it's the kind of writing that sits somewhere - in a space - between prose (what I keep trying to call writing-writing) and poetry. Mark Tredinnick calls a poem (in a recent essay on Robert Gray), "...a sculpture of meaningful sound. It's an architecture of voice".

Images: Top 'Haptic Writing #1 ' (SET 2010) 21x30cm handmade book with plant-dyed paper,
Bottom 'Haptic Writing #2'

Language and the coming into being creatively

2010-04-28T12:42:00.000+10:00

On Sunday I finished reading the poet Gregory Orr's autobiography, 'The Blessing'. On Monday I started reading Siri Hustvedt's 'The Shaking Woman (or A History of My Nerves)', also autobiographical.
Orr's narrative tells how he became a poet--when I first read his poetry, I found it difficult to withstand the unresolved grief at its centre--I could not 'face' it.
He had shot and killed his younger brother in a hunting accident when he was 12 years old, the book tells the story of what followed in luminous text, not a word is superfluous, not a word out-of-place (it is indeed a telling set in 'place': the two houses where he grew up, the hairy-scary outings with his father, the family's year in Haiti, Orr's time in Mississippi as Civil Rights activist, his moment of revelation in a field of iron statues). His coming-to-be-the-poet.
And when I moved from 'The Caged Owl' poems which had threatened to undo me--to his more recent 'Concerning the Book That Is The Body Of The Beloved', I not only sensed the shift but began to see the sense of it.

In his words:

You lost the beloved.
You thought: her page
Is torn from the book
Of life. You thought
It's as if he never lived

How wrong you were:
Loss writes so many
Poems in the Book,
Writes until its hand aches,
Till it's exhausted
And can't write anymore.

Then it sings a song.

(Gregory Orr, 'Concerning The Book That Is The Body Of The Beloved', p194)

And now I am two-thirds through Siri Hustvedt's search for an understanding of her shaking condition. She documents a journey through neurology and psychiatry, through the history of philosophy and psychology. It is a narrative of her search through 'space', not 'place' and yet she continually brings the theory back to her personal experience, her own body within that space. It is more extended essay then narrative, more a coming-to-language itself.

But how and why do these books concern me so? And they do.
I find myself connected to each of the texts, emotionally and intellectually but especially emotionally. And the gift of looking within--their stories, their losses, their questions. And mine.

First binding of '26 Poems I have Encountered' (2009)

A sense of wonder

2010-04-16T13:32:00.000+10:00

For some time I have wondered why I studied science first and only came to the arts much later (there are 30 years between my M Science and M Art Theory!). I had thought that it had to do with the 'framework' offered by scientific thought but recently I have realised the two are connected by a sense of 'wonder'.

Emma suggested I look at the website information is beautiful and it was there I did I found another link to a website with images of marine animals: 'New species in Antarctica'. And here was an example of my 'link' to understanding a part of how I came to be where I am. That moment of wonder--when I have no need of possession or of explanation, only a wish to recall the essence of the moment (Trinh T Minh-Ha also makes this point in When the Moon Waxes Red, 2991,p 23), I am still searching for Deleuze and Guattarri's view on the subject...

Yesterday I returned to a poem by Gregory Orr and found a(other) connection in the last three lines:

No wonder I go on
So. I go on so
Because of the wonder.

(Gregory Orr, Concerning the Book That Is the Body of the Beloved, Cooper Canyon Press, 2005, 83)

Sifting & Sorting

2010-03-17T12:27:00.000+11:00

I feel the writing of a new post is way over-due and it's not because my interest in the project is in any way dimmed. Quite the opposite, I seem to have passed the initial stage--where all is new and anything is possible--to one where I am continually sifting and sorting through ideas and definitions and finding myself as lost as ever.

Continuing on from my thoughts on the void ('Smooth Thought'), I find myself looking for possibilities to explore it further. That in itself maybe a problem, am I attempting the impossible (as in searching for definitions of Deleuzian concepts, which are impossibly 'unfixed' as they are continually in a process of 'be-coming'!)--how do you explore 'nothing'? A problem of perspective, perhaps.

Take everything out of the universe and what you have left is 'vaccum'. But even in a vacuum there is something--'dark energy' (a term from astronomy I heard in an interview on ABC Radio National between Richard Fidler and Tamara Davis on the expanding universe). It seems the definition of space is a problem even in science. Newtonian space is external and fixed whereas for Einstein, it is mutable and bendy--space time and matter are interconnected and inter-defined. But can space exist if there is nothing inside it? Even the astronomer can't answer. Geometry may remove the concept of 'time' from 'space' but now space and time are linked together and considered as one 'big block' we move through; interestingly Tamara Davis spoke of it as "the fabric of space time".

Perhaps here is my problem, the words themselves are beguiling but the concepts are mind-bending (I asked a mathematician recently how she would define the void mathematically, her reply: I don't go there).

There are a number of models of space-time, different kinds of space (and time) with different properties, all acceptable in one sense or another and so, no easy answer. To deal with this I return to a concept of space that I used in a previous project. One more relevant to this project. And thus find a way which holds onto the idea of what is a continuing process of change (temporality) that underlies this project.without rejecting the possibilities offered by the other models. Add to this the possibility of coincidence, the chance encounter and I think I am entering into the realm the 'performance'.

Meditation Square #5 (2010) detail

In The Practise of Everyday Life, French philosopher Michel de Certeau proposed an operation of language in relation to place and space, proposing 'place' to be an ordering system, akin to language and, 'space' to be a practised place with characteristics of speech and the spoken word. Hence space is unpredictable, transient and ambiguous, continually in a process of formation and never resolved.

1. This morning, while looking for another book, I came across the catalog for Space Odysseys an exhibition at the AGNSW in 2001. A friend had reminded me of it when commenting on my posting, 'Smooth Thought' but I have been unable to find the catalog until now.
Opening the catalog, Afraid? is written on the first page followed by, Don't try to understand and then, Just Believe (from Jean Cocteau's 1950 film Orphee). Good advice!

2. On a recent visit to Brisbane and the Asia Pacific Triennial (APT6) I came across a work by Charwei Tsi Mushroom Mantra--the Heart Sutra inscribed on living and slowly decaying fungi. As I was seeing this work three months after it had been installed, the mushrooms were shriveled but the calligraphy still visible. Both installation and a performance.

3. The book I was looking for (and found) this morning is about the work of performance artist, Barbara Campbell, Flesh Willow. Campbell stitched the text used to implicate the Mary Queen of Scots in her second husband's murder onto 60m of ribbon, then made it into a skirt. In her performance, Cries from Tower (1992) Campbell slowly unwound the shirt while wearing it standing high above the audience. (I saw a video recording of the performance in 2001.)
In the introductory essay to Flesh Willow , Sarah Miller comments: "...Campbell's work is never about excess. She assembles precisely what is necessary...Performance is ephemeral, and despite its documentary or material traces, chooses to inhabit the space of memory and personal engagement".

And this is what I hope to achieve!

Space Odysseys Art Gallery of NSW 2001
Flesh Willows Power Publications University of Sydney 2006

Image top: Wolf Quilt 2009

Note: Sue Pritchard in her essay 'Creativity and confinement' (Quilts 1700-2010) mentions Mary Queen of Scots 19-year imprisonment and her embroidery which makes a connection between Barbara Campbell's performance mentioned in this post and the link I make with Judy McDermott's work in my posting, quilts and prisons, in my associated blog, 'The Big House'.

Let The Beauty

2010-03-03T12:07:00.002+11:00

A friend sent me the following poem, a line from which she took as the title for her forthcoming solo exhibition (the details of which I will include at the end of this posting by way of acknowledgement):

Today, like every other day, we wake up empty and frightened.
Don't open the door to the study and begin reading.
Take down the musical instrument.
Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.

(Rumi)

I am hesitant to attempt to write another word that might risk the 'rightness' of such a poem yet I am reminded, once again, of how works by Hossein Valamanesh draw me to them in a similar way (and then discover such a connection already exists*).

For me it is the needle and thread that are my 'musical instrument', the act of stitching a form of meditation which stills the world. Words are more difficult, become fraught with uncertainty but perhaps with practice, they will come too.

Details of the exhibition: Let The Beauty We Love Be What We Do
*For a video in which Hossein Valamanesh discusses mentions the influence of Rumi on his work

Image: Detail of 'Mandala Cushion' (2009) antique Japanese sillk from the Philosopher's Path, Kyoto, hand stitched for a friend.

Truth and Lies

2010-02-22T15:20:00.000+11:00

What started out as as a collection of questions about how when a half-truth becomes a lie and how (self)deception can be have serious repercussions shifted diection when I bought a copy of 'The Monthly' magazine which contains an essay by Sebastian Smee on 'The Outsiders: Art and Mental Illness' (February 2010, p44).
The essay, written as a series of fragments, operates on a number of levels: the tragic deaths of a father and daughter, the mentally ill as outsiders, and how mental illness and creativity is perceived to be connected (thus treament will obstruct or even destroy the creative impulse--a serious and potentially dangerous belief which Smee comes close to but doesn't confront). As such, the essay is not so much about art and mental illness, as it is about the misconceptions which surround such illnesses and how fearful we can be of individuals who suffer from them.
And while I attempt to make sense of the mix of emotions I feel while attempting to understand this essay and the issues it raises, I wonder if I am also having serious difficulties with this topic and not just Sebastian Smee.
How difficult and at times impossible it is to deal with altered realities within ourselves or those we love, and how much easier its is to exist in a state of denial and self-deception (itself an alternative reality). Although I understand very little about the true nature of creativity, I do know that the mind in a psychotic state has little opportunity for creativity.

Postscript:
The next issue of 'The Monthly' published a letter in response to Smee's article sent in by Mike Parr ('Degenerate Art', in Correspondence, March 2010, p72). Parr starts off his letter: I was utterly shocked by Sebastian Smee's irresponsible article...and goes on to take Smee to task over most of the points he makes in the original article. I found myself agreeing with many of the issues Kelly raised, some corresponded with my own response response but I had probably taken Smee's essay too personally and felt grateful Mike Parr had taken the trouble to write to The Monthly and the position he took .
The discussion continued in the next issue, with a response from Sebastian Smee to what he describes as Mike Parr's angry letter, and in which Smee defends his position in his original essay ('No Easy Answers', in Correspondence, April 2010, p73). Yet I don't feel Smee was able to make amends with this letter or resurrect his essay.
I will end with Mike Parr's last sentence:

The essayist is a coward and his 'essay' is an ignorant, cowardly attack on a vast population of loved ones who suffer the terrible isolation and loneliness of mental illness.

Harsh words but the experience of mental illness is considerably harsher.

Smooth Thought

2010-01-19T17:01:00.000+11:00

I have walked the track we call the 'undercliff' in the early evening of each of the past two days--something I haven't done since the hot and humid weather began. It's changed, more open to the sky than I remember and the sandstone cliffs that rise steeply above the path are covered with ferns; a result of all the rain we've been having, I tell myself. There is no one else around, only the sounds of vehicles in the valley below tell me I'm not that alone.

Thoughts creep into consciousness, lead one from another, with no discernable links between them, branch off in all directions and move in and out of my mind as I walk along the almost but no longer quite so familiar track. As I near the end of the path, I ask myself a question: could these diverse and seemingly unconnected thoughts, linked only in time by my process of walking along a certain track, be an example of 'smooth thought' in terms of D&G's concept of 'smooth space': rhizomal in structure, networked, relational and transverse (The Deleuze Dictionary, Adrian Parr, 231)?

It is the void which has been occupying my thinking mind recently. Is it a space or an example of non-space? Surely a 'void' is more than 'emptiness'? I can find no reference to it (so far) in 1,000 Plateaus. I could look in Freud and Lacan but they are not the focus of this project. D&G have freed me from considering an object (the quilt in particular) as a 'symptom'. It's a major insight for me, as I had considered such an analysis (in terms of a pathology) to be a personal failing which, now giving it more thought, probably was--after all it was I who had chosen Freud in the first place.

Let me try to explain where I've got to by mapping my thoughts as I walked along (some of the links have been added later):

Thread One: Anish Kapoor: his work in the AGNSW Void Field (1980)--large pieces of stone, the top surface cut flat the sides irregular, I had at fist walked past them but the dark holes in the top of each block drew me back. Deep, dark, I am tempted to put my fingers into one but strangely fearful of what might happen. "I want to try to make things that remain secret" AK said in an interview in the TATE magazine, but it's more than that.

Link: A memory of the maze beneath the castle in Bratislava, the entrance to a part of which warned only those of a strong constitution should enter here and, despite my intrepidation, my husband and son persuaded me to go in with them. My right hand holding onto a rope attached to the wall, my left hand holding on to my son's belt as he walked in front of me and my husband behind, the three of us moved into the complete darkness. I still attempt to understand my sensation of dis-embodiment, in darkness I became mind-only and completely in-the-present.

"Kapoor's objects take on and disrupt the orderly space of galleries" (John Tusa) and I agree--as I had almost disregarded the collection of stone blocks but luckily for me, I took another look. But again, it's more than that. There is a push--pull happening here, I am caught been fascination and fear.

Thread Two: Hossein Valamanesh Middle Path (2008) from his series, No Love Lost: a scroll, the word 'love' written repetitively in Farsi in saffron ink across its surface, in one area the writing fades until it is almost invisible, then reemerges. I find this work extraordinarily beautiful--the yellow text, only a section of the scroll visible the either end remains hidden, the graceful curving lines of script. Meditative, it calms the mind.

Link: I realise Valamanesh's work was in the same room as Void Field although I had spent time with each during different visits.

Thread Three: an exhibition of Wolfgang Laib's work at AGNSW (I now realise this is the site linking all three threads of thought) in 2005. The colour yellow, but pollen not saffron.

A sense of the sacred runs through these three but I am still not there, or am I? Not yet.

Image: my photograph of a section of an ice sculpture, Sahoro, Hokkaido January 2110

Abstract accepted!

2010-01-04T19:33:00.000+11:00

I'm in Japan--on the northernmost island of Hokkaido for two weeks. it's been interesting signing in as my blog commands are in Japanese but luckily I was able to work out the position from memory.

On Christmas Eve I heard that my abstract for a paper, 'Performing the quilt: from the block to the blog and back again' has been accepted! A great Christmas present!

Now to get down to the real work of looking more closely at Deleuze & Guaterri's work (it is the how and why they gave the patchwork quilt, in particular, as an example of their concept of 'smooth space' and not something else, a paved area for example, I'd love to know). And someone I met recently also suggested I look at their theory of 'assemblage' but I haven't been able to track down a reference for that yet (I've just realised this is another form of connection, one I've still to make).

And then of course there is the performance aspects to work out...

Image: Sahoro, Hokkaido 2009

The Art of Joan Schulze Poetic Licence

2009-12-21T14:37:00.000+11:00

A few days ago I asked my husband if he could give me an example of something that was obscure, his reply: "the way you look for connections between things when there aren't any".

But here is an example of something that has definite connections with this project. In November 2008, Joan visited me and asked me to write an essay to be included in a catalogue to her retrospective exhibition to be held in February 2010. By June this year the catalogue had become a book: The Art of Joan Schulze, Poetic Licence which will be published at the end of January and it will contain my essay, 'A Poetics of Cloth, Paper, Stitch and Line'.

But I know I still haven't explained how this project is connected to the overarching subject of this blog which focuses on a study of interconnections and the work of three quiltmakers: Judy McDermott, Pamela Fitzsimons and Emma Rowden.

In September 2000 I visited Judy in the old gold-mining town of Hill End, where she was the artist-in-residence at Haefligers' Cottage . Early the first morning and over a cup of tea, Judy asked me if I had seen the work of Joan Schulze (Judy had visited the States earlier that year and had bought a book of Joan's work, the first volume of The Art of Joan Schulze). As we looked through images of Joan's work together Judy suggested I could contact Joan as part of the research I was doing for my masters.

I 'googled' Joan when I got home and finding an email address, sent her an email. Within a couple of hours I had a reply and from Joan herself...And so a dialogue began: emails and letters, a first meeting in San Francisco when I visited Joan in her studio. Joan visited Australia the following year and Judy, Pamela and I (plus others) were in a workshop she gave at Lake Keepit near Tamworth.

Joan later selected an essay of mine to be included in another of her catalogues but this is the first time I have work published in a book , one with hard covers (although it is also to be published in softcover form).

So one thing leads to another and I have Judy to thank for introducing me to Joan's work.

How can I keep my thoughts together?

2009-12-10T11:56:00.000+11:00

I plan to write a post on my blog most days but my time gets scattered, int erupted, distracted and, thought unlike fragments, which can be collected and joined together again (I could say 'pieced' but I would give myself away here) to form a whole, if one that is incomplete and different from that first envisaged. An element of despair here--how ever will I keep myself together?

I have been thinking about 'embodiment' and this has more to do (at the start anyway) with issues raised for me in Emma's project on the Callan Park site. Emma recently sent me a draft of a paper she was to give (and has now given) at the University of Lincoln on 'Architecture and Justice'. Her PhD explores the concept of the 'virtual court': a system of justice which at its extreme could result in the business of 'the court' taking place in cyberspace (but I am not doing her considerable work justice here and I hope to explore it on more detail and, more accurately with Emma herself or perhaps she will do it for me!).

In her paper, she explores an individuals "embodied experience" in a court of justice unmediated by communication technology in comparison with the court mediated by communication technology: what she terms the "situated body" versus the "dis-located' body.

I see (well, definitely intuit) a connection between the court, the mental hospital (Callan Park) and the gaol (Long Bay--I had written 'of course' but even that needs further explanation) and thus Emma's quilt and those in Judy McDermott's Big House series...Connections with quilts in their material form and the idea of their structure being related to concepts of smooth space and the structure of cyberspace...And the blog as a series of fragments on similar and disparate topics. And remember I am looking for connections that are disparate, as well as, similar. Perhaps it is 'disparateness' (interestingly the spellchecker wants me to write 'desperateness' here, it may well have a point) which offers greater possibilities (certainly initially). But then one can never be certain.

I find my thoughts ricocheting between mind and body, concepts of sanity (losing ones mind), even the thought of posting a blog (that is writing something somewhere in the nothingness of cyberspace, or is the the something-know-not-what of cyberspace) but then letters get lost too.

Image: from my '26 Object Project' (2008)

Quilting the Blog/Blogging the Quilt

2009-12-03T17:31:00.000+11:00

After two months of experimenting with the process of blogging I realise that whereas cyberspace may well have share similarities in structure with the quilt, the process of writing a blog is a linear one and therefore does not offer the possibilities of a rhizomal structure as anticipated. I was also finding that this blog (quilted-out-of-space) is more of a journal of my thoughts and day-to-day encounters than explorations of the specific quilts which form the basis of this project.
This is where the idea of inter-linking a number of separate blogs comes from, thereby giving me, the writer the possibility of cross-referencing ideas in time and space between the different blogs.
So, I have set up: quilted-out-of-gaol, quilted-out-of-time and, quilted-out-of mind together with this first blog site, quilted-out-of-space.
Each of the three new blogs will focus on specific work by the three artists as well as seek out connections in terms of similarities and disparities between them.

By Coincidence

2009-11-19T15:07:00.000+11:00

I find myself collecting all those small fragments left over from a quilt, fragments too precious to throw into the bin beneath my work table. The pile grows steadily until it starts to encroach into my working space, then a pile of plant-dyed wools gets mixed with the fragments and, here before me, by pure coincidence and little else, I have the making of a quilt--my 'parallel journeys' quilt, named in honour of an emerging and unexpected (coincidental?) collaboration. I choose my words with care. Already 'pure' unsettles me, questions arise in my writing mind ('honour' seems appropriate it's how I feel, honoured that such actions, those of collaboration seem to be emerging of their own volition into the light).

'Pure' is by definition: unmixed, unadulterated but 'coincidence' (occurring or being together) blends those that occur or be together, creating other meaning, symbols or memories. As a noun it lacks the dynamic self which lies within it, while 'coincide' in its verb form appeals to me more--by introducing both time and space into the equation (huh I seem to be arguing my scientific self here, losing the spontaneity of a coincidence, that leap of thought to somewhere until then unknown).

I had set out to make a list of coincidences but instead I find it is coincidence itself which appears to be a dynamic of this project. I have Francis Ponge and Ruth to thank for this insight. A book of Ponge's selected poems sits next to me as I write and I had lifted it absent-mindedly (my mind coincidentally elsewhere concerning itself with Nick's un-wellness and need for chicken soup) and read it before I started to type out this erstwhile list.

Water's restlessness: sensitive to the slightest change of slope. Jumping downstairs both feet at a time. Playful, childishly obedient, coming right back when you call it by shifting the incline to this side (FP, Selected Poems, p59).

And a poem by Mark Tredinnick included in this year's "Best Australian Poems": for I am also marked by the moon, my vision occluded.

On Coincidence

2009-11-19T14:41:00.000+11:00

Why Smoke?

2009-11-12T13:10:00.000+11:00

No, I'm not advocating the benefits of taking up smoking but I did come across an interesting article in a rercent issue of 'Cosmos' magazine (#29) entitled, Why Schizophrenics Smoke (p16).

Statistics suggest over three times as many people suffering from schizophrenia smoke when compared to the population as a whole (the short article quotes work done by psychiatrist Ruth Barr at Queen's University Belfast, so I suspect the numbers are based on the UK population). It had been thought that the benenfits of nicotine were assosicated with overcoming the symptoms of smoking/nicotine withdrawal (I take this to be studies using nicotine patches to help smokers quit). Whereas this study investigated the link between the high incidence of smoking and the effect of nicotine on the symptoms of the illness and suggests it helps attention span, memory and reduces impulsive behaviour. So it may go at least part of the way to explain why so many people who suffer from schizophrenia smoke (...and help their family more understanding of their smoking...well perhaps!).

Postcard from MAD

2009-11-10T16:07:00.000+11:00

This posting is the sort of postcard you carry home with you and send to a friend once you've returned--it doesn't have the authenticity of one sent from the distant destination, and so may elicit a certain disappointment in the receiver but it's a message from afar nonetheless:

We visited the new Museum of Art and Design on Columbus Circle, New York on October 13. The museum is so new it felt as if they were still unpacking the collection but check out the building (I'll put the website at the foot of this posting)--it's impressive and what is more, it's dimensions are people-friendly! We started at the second floor and walked up to the fifth or sixth (I think you're meant to take the lift to the top floor and walk down, never mind). Here are some of the things I saw and wanted to tell you about:

City Slicker (1987) by Susan Shie, I've seen her work in photographs but never before in the real , it's even crazier, 3-dimensional--pockets, cloth animals and figures attached to the surface of the quilt! I liked the idea of pockets on a quilt most of all. When I turned around from gazing at Susan's quilt, a small textile object in a case caught my eye: Tennessee Valley Authority Applique Quilt Man with Crane (1934) by Ruth Clement Bond, you can see it on the MAD website (search 'collection') I couldn't help make the connection with Kara Walker's work 70 years later! Finally (I must be running out of room if this is a postcard) Grandmother's Treasures (2008) by Vika Mitrichenka (I think this may be also known as "Tea set "Victoria: no. 12 in the collection): apparently Vika made this work in memory of her grandmother who always repaired broken china (as mine did) but as her eyesight failed she mixed and mismatched the fragments, I really like this work it appeals to my sense of the quirky. See you soon, Love from me xx

MAD website: http://www.madmuseum.org/

Image: New York reflected (taken by me while walking around Manhattan)

The Uncanny

2009-11-09T09:39:00.000+11:00

When I first thought about doing this project, a major attraction was the possibility of exploring other ways of looking and writing about quilts (Freud and his theories were the focus of my master's thesis). From a position of ignorance I thought Deleuze and Guattari would represent a new starting point for my ongoing work. I already knew Felix Guattari was a psychoanalyst so why was I surprised to find that no, this was not to be a new starting point but more of the next marker along the way!

But I have entitled this post, 'The Uncanny' (a reference of course to Freud's essay on the subject) so I will now explain why:

Tidying the kitchen table yesterday I came across my recent copy of 'gleebooks gleaner' which I had already read but hadn't noticed the small ad in the bottom left hand corner of the back page for a workshop to be held at the NSW Writers' Centre on December 13th: Prof Robin Hemley of Iowa University is to spend a day 'Exploring Creative Non-Fiction', the very thing that drives me forward...and I know about the Iowa Writing Program (it's famous!).

So I rang this morning just before 9am. Yes, there are still places but another person (Julie) will phone me back, the workshop is for experienced, published writers working on a creative non-fiction project and will I qualify?

(Please, please yes!).

So what is uncanny about this, you ask?

The NSW Writers' Centre is located in the grounds of Callan Park, now Sydney College of the Arts. It is 'Garryowen' the very house John Ryan Brenan, my great great great grand father built in 1839!

I grew up thinking it was family mythology that we once owned a grand house on the banks of the Parramatta River (by this I mean wishful, fanciful, after all my grandmother also thought I should marry Prince Charles...), a family story which also claimed the house and grounds were lost in a card game by 'wicked Uncle Joe' (John Ryan's third son, born 1824).

All this was changed when Em started telling me about her final year architecture project, 'Reconfiguring the Wall'. I had laughed telling her my grandmother had believed the family had one owned the property and when I mentioned the family name, Em had replied yes--her research in the Mitchell Library confirmed the family story!

What is more, it is the subject of one of the quilts this project is all about and the connections are now only in the distant past but reach forward into the present, dance around us, encircle us. It may be chance, it may be fate but they are indisputable and unbreakable.

Phone call: I'm in to the masterclass!!

Notes: Sigmund Freud's essay is to be found in volume 14: Art and Literature of the Penguin Freud Library1985, p335-376

An image of the house can be found on the NSW Wriers' Centre website http://www.nswwriterscentre.org.au/

The image at the beginning of this post is another taken during the process of rebinding Meadow's book

Re-Binding

2009-11-08T16:01:00.000+11:00

A month or so ago a friend asked me if I would re-bind a favourite book of nursery rhymes which had belonged to her son, now father of a daughter, her grand-daughter. The book duly arrived and I spent the next month fearful my inexperience in the art of re-binding books would damage what was obviously a book of great personal value. Yet the book itself was in need of repair: it lacked a spine and the covers were falling off. So I went ahead, first dismantling the book then repairing the individual pages and stitching them back together using teal-coloured linen bookbinding thread (why use cream thread when it is a children's book and the teal seemed to match the illustrations!). When I reassembled the pages and found I had reversed pages 21 and 22, I vacillated over whether to correct my mistake (which would mean re-cutting and turning the pages potentially damaging them further) but ended up leaving them as they were (reassured by an email leaving the decision up to me). I made the casing out of green buckram book-cloth--similar to the original--and finally a dust cover.

The whole process was a joyful one, the book is full of full of rhymes, some I remember from my childhood and some I don't, and the illustrations by Helen Oxenbury are quirky.

Why am I including it here--well, it started me thinking what connects/binds us?

Friendship, time and place, interests, personal story/the stories we tell and, in terms of this project: institutions (asylum/prison/notions of home)...as the edge of a quilt is bound, so are we.

Details of the book: "Cake and Custard" Children's rhymes chosen by Brain Alderson and illustrated by Helen Oxenbury, published by Heinemann: London, 1974

Images: Top right: book re-bound, top left: dismantling the book

New York, New York

2009-10-12T20:51:00.000+11:00

I am writing this in New York, it's just before 6am--the trials of jet lag, we awoke around 4am. Our first morning we took a cab to see an exhibition by Farida Bartool, 'Maa Tuje Salaam' (Hail To Mother) at the Aícon Gallery . The connection: she was doing a masters at CoFA the same time I was and we got talking on the first day--our topics were seemingly unrelated but there were already a number of other connections: I had lived in Pakistan (where Farida is from) as a child but even apart from that there was always lots to discuss. After finishing her masters, she returned to Lahore, married, gave birth to a son and continued working and we have kept in contact. She is now in London studying for a PhD (another topic we discussed regularly), and when she sent a notice of this, her first exhibition in NY I found the last day of the exhibition would be our first day here.

Why do I feel all this is a topic for this blog? I think it has to do with connections of disparate and similar people and places (D & G's rhizome), across time and shared experience. Her message is quite overtly political but carries the personal and private anxiety of a mother (her son's image appears in a number of the works overlaid with confronting images of the military and, in another work, of surveillance). She uses the photographic process of 'leticular' prints (I need to check I have the correct term) which has the effect of making the images shift from one to another and while I am not convinced with the aesthetic result I think I am beginning to understand ('see') that it is appropriate to her message.

Images: (1) from the exhibition (2) a mirror encountered in a restaurant where we stopped for lunch (--a hamburger, it is NYC!)

Reply

2009-10-08T17:17:00.000+11:00

There is an echo in my head. I dare not call mine 'art', or any such thing. And yet there is all of me in it. 'Re-enactment' can be 'performance', as giving voice.
There are threads of connection here, I know and admire this artist's work and puzzle the responses she gives to the poet's questions as to her inspiration. She is an artist who gives voice (and form) to those who lived their lives in places such as (and including) Callan Park.
There is more for me to work on here.
The poet is artist too, her work taps felt experience and if she is but 're-enacting' it, it is with courage which tears away the other's cloak of invisibility.
I thank her for it.

A Poem

2009-10-08T17:09:00.000+11:00

A poem sent to me by a friend this morning (I have her permission to post it here):

Artists

After the gallery talk
I approached and asked
if her life inspired her art
(it seemed important at the time).
but she said 'no',
she liked it to be 'cold'
and not a 're-enactment'.

Hers is a noble art,
she gives voices to the silenced
gleaned from archives and research,
unlike mine which I now see
has broken a taboo.
To bridge aesthetic distance
is verboten
and I have crossed a line.

Work made to save one's life
enters into territory
too discomforting and difficult,
too vunerable and fragile,
too self-revealing
to call Art.

VK 19.2.09

2009-10-08T12:47:00.000+11:00

Today is not a day for blogs, this morning I have attempted to post two poems (a friends and my own plus one written at the time and I thought now lost:

I have a voice
unheard
A cry
lost in
deep space.

Or not.

On Balance

2009-10-01T11:44:00.000+10:00

Last night at yoga we spent the session concentrating on balance and, as I was having particular difficulties maintaining my balance, I thought there must be a message in it for me...so I started with the quilt and the concept of 'balance' in aesthetics and design. All three of the quiltmakers I am interested in have a particular way of approaching 'balance' (to which I add, in my opinion to all points, of course!):

as an architect, Emma Rowden would bring a very special set of precepts (whether conscious or not), her training and tendency would be a 'balance in terms of the spacial arrangement' the units or blocks making up the quilt surface (I need to remember this point when exploring 'space' further)
Judy McDermott was a potter before a quiltmaker and her surfaces bear the mark of her experience in moulding pots. Many of her quilts are large and weighty--I had a personal experience of this when hanging her exhibition, there was no way many of the larger quilts could be hung single-handed! J was cognisant of the theory but would often challenge it intentionally with the result that the viewer would be put 'off' balance, a potentially unsettling experience
Pamela Fitzsimons has a strong commitment to aesthetics and design in a work, whether it be hers or someone else's. Her works are evidence of this and very beautiful (and satisfying) to look at i.e. balanced in a visual sense

Then there are considerations of balance in the narrative sense:

by definition a quilt is one-sided, some makers use both sides, as in both points of view. Em and Judy utilise both sides (I make this statement and start to think of exceptions...as one does!)
can terms such as 'narrative arch' be applied to quilts, I need to think more about this, particularly in terms of my examples
does 'binding' add balance (resolution)? This is where quilts confront notions of 'smooth' space which is un-bounded

There are the linguistic uses of 'balance', for example:

if I am 'unbalanced' I am unstable, off my head. with relevance in terms of one quilt's connection with the site of a mental hospital and potentially another series with a gaol...I am getting ahead of myself in this blog as I realise I still have to set out the parameters of my project...to use the vernacular and say someone is off their block...
does justice aim to be 'balanced' i.e. fair...allow both sides of the argument to be heard?

Now I am looking up the various definitions of 'balance' in the OED (there are lots!)

apparatus for = an object, let's use a quilt as the central pivot
counteracting force
regulating device
harmony and proportion (ref, art as above)
in the... in dispute, uncertain
strike a ... moderate course, between anecdote and theory perhaps

Images: Judy McDermott, 'Love Will Nail You To The Cross' 1995-7 (200 x 140 cm); Pamela Fitzsimons, installation shot (details to come)

My Studio, The Project (part 1)

2009-09-28T18:20:00.000+10:00

First up where does the name for this blog come from? A few years ago, before my studio was built I dreamt I was standing in the doorway to my (to be) studio above which was a sign: 'Quilted Out Of Space' and when I was deciding what to call this blog, I remembered the name and, since my project is all about space or, more correctly, 'smooth space', it seemed to fit!
Today (and yesterday and the day before that and before that) seems to have been spent chasing the red dust around and around.
So, to my current project, I've called that (and yes I love namimg things): Preforming the Quilt, From the Block to the Blog and Back Again. It has started as 'Bog' instead of 'Block' because of an early reference to my great great great grandfather who first built a house on a the site associated with one of the quilts I am interested in as part of this project. He was an Irish Catholic who arrived in Sydney (Australia) in 1834. Studying his story it seems as though he encountered his share of prejudice from the 'establishment' because of his background as 'bog irish'. He was a barrister and appointed coroner but missed out on the job as superintendent of convicts which would have secured the family financially.
(To be continued...)

2009-09-26T22:35:00.000+10:00

Hi I thought I would attempt to sign-in again and it works, so by tomorrow I hope to have set up more information on my blog!

2009-09-26T17:28:00.000+10:00

Hi, this is the first time I've set up a blog so this is a 'test' (in more ways than one). I am hoping to post regular blogs on my project--quilted out of space--and hoping to get as many comments as possible .
So, fingers crossed, here goes...