'This is my landscape'

I have decided to rename this page this is my landscape, a reference to a quote from The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath. I will post images I think relevant yet not exactly tied to any one post. I have retained the Blogbook entries for 2010 after the photographs.

Wallaby: our early morning
visitor June 4 2012 

Iris with lyre bird sculpture
Simon's Garden, June 4 2012

Perigee Moon, May 2012
from the door of my studio

Simon's Garden

More images from Rajasthan 2011

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A Week-Long Visit from the Frogmouth Owls (April 2012)

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Images from Rajasthan (January 2011):

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My Studio (2012)

Misty morning, looking across the valley: we live on a ridge in the autumn and spring we often wake to thick mist in the valley

My studio (2012) : the original 'quilted out of space' 

Maya's Quilt (2011)

MCA May 7 2012

                          Now you see me, now you don't - Thank you for photo Dorothy

Quetta market (1956)

Our house in Quetta Pakistan (1956)

My father, a keen horseman

The Quetta Road to the Khujak Pass, Pakistan

Journal March 28-June 15, 2007
47 x 200 cm
Hmong hemp stitched with silk & cotton threads,
bordered with silk, machine pieced, hand stitched throughout
cotton batting (image: N H R Tucker & S E Wood)

Logbook: n. a book containing a detailed record or log (OED)

Note: this log is laid out first-to-most-recent, please scroll to the bottom to see latest log entry...

Sunday, April 18 2010

I have started this page to log my impressions of keeping a blog (hence 'Blogbook'). At the start of this project I had thought the blog would act as a journal or lab book to document the progress of this project. I planned the blog would replace the notes book(s) I keep.

Not so, it is turning out to be a much more complex process and something else altogether.

I 'work' each post as I might bring together fragments of cloth to make a block, working and reworking the fragments of cloth/words, cutting and restitching the whole until I am satisfied.

And yet the 'post' also represents something in between what I hope to achieve in a finished piece of writing and my notebooks. Each 'post' represents a group of thoughts which are occupying my mind at that time, more like ideas I bring to a conversation and thus a work-in-progress or a map-of-process.

And so I have answered one of my questions almost before I start--undoubtedly I write as I make quilts, cutting and pasting my writing as I would blocks in a quilt.

So it is the other elements of writing a blog which I now need to focus on.

Tuesday, April 20

Could this project be more about the making of connections (our inevitable connectedness) than esoteric notions of space??

We must live in the world artistically (in order to make sense of it) E Grosz 'Arctitecture from the Outside', p174, quoting Bergson

Wednesday, April 21

To return to the structure of this project: early on I found the process to be too linear so set up the three additional blogs--Quilted Out Of Gaol,  Out Of Mind and Out Of Time to document the research on the three quiltmakers (these are the 'associated blogs': The Big House, Reconfiguring the wall and About time). This process has been improved by the ability to make connections or 'links' between the four blogs (as well as making references to other artists/websites within a given 'post').

Thus more like a quilt and smooth space in structure .

One difference between the structure of a quilt and that of smooth space is that a quilt is considered to consist of a number of (two or more) layers, Deleuze & Guatarri make no reference to this in their concept of smooth space. Space, however, must be considered to be multidimensional and the quilt is essentially two dimensional unless one considers its layered structure which, with the additional of the quilting stitch becomes three dimensional...

Thursday, April 22

Leading on coincidentally from where I finished yesterday's entry, a friend sent me an email today which prompted me to consider an aspect of Emma Rowden's quilt, Reconfiguring the wall (see link to the 'Out of Mind' blog noted yesterday).

This quilt sits somewhere between a wall hanging (in the simplest sense--it is intended to hang vertically, I'm feeling my way here) and what  Emma intends it to be, a quilt documenting and representing her architectural thesis. It certainly has two-sides: on one are the final plans for re-development of the Callan Park site printed on an old linen bed sheet while the other consisted of  a 'pieced' (in quilted terms, fragments stitched one to each other) documenting the history of the site...old photographs, street plans, fliers and newspaper articles gleaned form the Mitchell Library (Sydney),as well as stitched and embroidered fragments dyed with plant material from the site.

The two sides, however, are not 'connected' (or perhaps not 'yet') in the physical sense by stitching,  a feature any die hard quiltmaker will tell you is fundamental (see most conditions for entering a work to a quilt exhibition) to something being called 'a quilt'.

But Emma intended this to be a quilt (something I argue is central to such a works definition: the artist's intent) and the two sides are most definitely 'connected' in terms of subject matter...the documentary/pieced side is fundamental to the process of developing the final plans for the site...you need to see both sides. It is thus a quilt that must hang in space.

This aspect connects Emma's work to Judy McDermott's, who regularly pieced both sides of her quilts.

I now need to return to D&G's theory of smooth space as I have a feeling these points raise some interesting issues for the overall direction of this project.

I am beginning to feel the structure of my blogs is beginning to slip away again..oh dear time yet again for a rethink!

(And hooray I've relocated the spell check!)

Tuesday, April 26

On Sunday I finished reading, 'The Blessing' by Gregory Orr (the poet). He points out the etymology of the word, blessing: a wound, blood and sacrifice.

At the seminar given by Robin Hemley at the NSW Writers' Centre in October last year, of the 11 people present--five had a family member or partner who suffered from schizophrenia, including Robin Hemley who has written a book 'Nola'  about his sister in particular but his family and himself as well.

How close and clear is this link between trauma, mental illness and creativity.

For how many is "Art  is a guaranty of Sanity" (Louise Bourgeois 2000, pencil on pink paper 27.9x21.6cm)?

Gregory Orr finishes his book with the description of a visit to the sculptor David Smith's property. It was to be a life-changing experience.

Kiki Smith is David Smith's daughter. Her work (which I greatly admire) often belongs to that difficult space between the appealing and the repellent, the narrative and the obtuse, the awkward and the polished.

This is to be the subject of my next post, I think!

Wednesday, April 28

I made an error in yesterday's log! Kiki Smith's father was Tony Smith and not David Smith as I had thought, both were sculptors.

So a dis-connection rather than a connection!

But I did make a connection with Pamela this morning and clarified the name of the 'lost' bird (the glossy black cockatoo). The original image, however, remains 'lost'.

A dream the night before last which I am including in this log because I believe it has relevance...I am preparing for an exhibition which I am curating, it is to include works by both Judy and Pamela (as this project does) and also some of my own quilts. I am checking the quilts for hanging and look at one of mine, it is naive in appearance: simple applique figures, the sort that figure in so many how-to-quilt books. I realise with shame they have no relevance beside Judy's and Pamela's work. Then I notice one of Judy's quilts rolled up and on the floor, I am horrified it has been left where someone could step on it, I waiting for Judy to arrive.

Siri Hustvelt explores the significance of dreams in her 'Shaking Woman' and concludes they are the mind shifting and sorting--since my dream has lingered, I am attempting to identify connections...I have been using images of my own work in this blog (out-of-space)--my thesis images won't upload so I need to rescan images of Judy's work to be included, something which is weighing on my mind...

On another subject altogether I am having problems with terminology: 'writing' as a noun form as distinguished from poetry...I will think it through further.

Friday, April 30

Last night a lecture given by Dorothy Caldwell at CoFA--I knew she had influenced my work after I did a workshop with her in 2004 but it was only while sitting there listening to her last night that I realised how how profound her influence has been.

There is a connection here as well! When Judy and I first started to discuss my masters project, the evening I had asked her if she would be involved (we were driving back from the Powerhouse Museum in the pouring rain, it was late at night and I had gotten us lost in the back streets of Wahroonga) we started a discussing the 'narrative nature' of quilts (as one does!). a hobby-horse of mine at the time and with which Judy agreed (...that quilts are indeed narrative). Judy eschewed the popular notion associated with the imagery of the 'good woman stitching by the fireside by lamplight' and later in the conversation mentioned Dorothy's name as someone whose work I should look out for in this context. Judy and Pamela had both done workshops with Dorothy.

In 2004 Dorothy was in Australia and I did one of her workshops which focused on Kantha work. It was a be a pivotal moment.

I have spent the day scanning slides of Judy McDermott's quilts. I now have 52 images to work with!

Monday, May 3

A friend emailed on Friday and reminded me of Elizabeth Grosz's book: 'Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the framing of the earth', I had forgotten that I had it!

I opened it to find a epigraph to the first chapter:

Art and nothing but art! It is the great means of making life possible, the great seduction of life, the great stimulant to life. Art [i]s the only superior counterpoint to a will to denial of life. 

(Friedrich Nietzsche, 'The Will to Power')

It is Grosz's engagement with chaos and the cosmos which I am hoping will help me access some of the issues concerning the void that seem to have arisen.

Friday, April 14

This morning I opened Robert Dessaix's book Arabesques (Picador 2008) at random and found this quote on the opened page before me:

...I've made up my mind to write at random. It's not an easy undertaking because the pen (it's a fountain pen)...(p255)

Having got this far I find myself deciding (as if it is another part of me thinking this as the me-in-the present copies down the quote) that this will be my next 'post'.

But first to list some other motivations (and here I was about to say 'compulsions' as writing seems to start, for me anyway, as a sort of 'need'):

-Yesterday I received a copy of an essay on the poet Robert Gray by the (also poet) Mark Tredinnick--which had been published in the Sun Herald. It's a beautiful essay, as light as the air breathed in and out, that says as much about the nature of poetry itself as about Robert Gray.

-The day before a thought occurred: the void is hanging on the edge of the known, the disembodied self, no past, no future and in-the-present, alone in total darkness.

-By naming this blog quilted out of space may explain why I regularly find myself compelled to consider the unknown. This had not been apparent to me when I decided on this name--it seemed to fit the nature of the project (considering I knew little about Deleuze and Guatarri, or the nature of cyberspace, and I had never blogged before...) as well as having come across the name in a dream some years ago (explained in my first post) but these were my conscious reasons, I sense the unconscious at work.

Monday, May 10

On April 3, Emma left a comment on my March 16 posting (in quilted-out-of-space). In it she raised some interesting issues that I intend to respond to in the 'Reconfiguring the Wall'.

In summary [my immediate comments in square brackets]:

• she is also looking at the way time and space 'bends', video-conferencing in particular...she posits that hybrid realities are becoming everyday experiences--mobiles, Facebook, emails...similar in sensation to 'getting lost' in a book, or absorption in a film [to which I would add 'daydreaming', the process of 'imagining' all of which suggest, such sensations are nothing new in terms of psycho-neurology]
• her interest is how our bodies relate to space in time [is it how you define/perceive 'space' in terms of this, as these may be entwined]  and which Em calls 'inhabiting'
• She links this with trace [to me, this is 'past' rather than 'present' time and closer to 'memory', I think there may be a link with Bergson here]
• And then goes on to discuss 'performance' [very relevant to this project] referring to Goffman (?) and Judith Butler
• On the phone [Skype, chat-room and so on] how does one mark one's existence 'there' in place?

[What about the third space, the 'space between ' of Bergson??]

Tuesday, May 11

Listening to ABC Radio National in the car this morning, the Book Show was on (I can't get RN at home so it is always 'chance' what I will hear when I go out during the day)...this morning there was an interview with the poet Jill Jones who talked about the 'cut-up' technique for writing poetry...I thought it would be interesting to give it a go:

My white undecorated ware did

New territory opened up by

A discussion with friend and

Emptiness of hero-worship, and

This unequivocal lack of inquiry

(five lines of five words taken at random from pages in an 'Artlink' magazine (vol 29, no 2) that happened to be on my desk beside me)...

a link to the process of quiltmaking, the process of collage and D & G's 'smooth space'!

Wednesday, May 12

Looking through my blog this morning I have found a number of typos, very frustrating. Perhaps the answer is to keep checking...

I also looked at the site meter by location, some very interesting visits--US, Canada, France, Germany, UK, Japan, India--I need a way to explore this, perhaps Mariko Mori's Link  is a start to investigating more of her works (of which I've seen a number but haven't understood them at the time). The idea (from yesterday's work on D&G and my post on Reconfiguring the Wall: 'That Inbetween Space') that we each carry around our own 'space-time' is an interesting idea, fits with Nick's idea of how birds avoid flying into obstacles such as branches...

Friday, May 14

A friend came to the door of my studio and, as I watched from the kitchen window she stood and peered through the studio window at the chaos within: rolls of paper, some loose, book cloth, cutting mat, box board, scraps of fabric waiting to be pieced.

...After many days of writing I decided it was time to do something with my hands (that is, something other than typing at the keyboard of my laptop), so yesterday afternoon I started to bind a series of poems a friend had sent me. What my visitor saw through the window was a project interrupted and awaiting completion.

And that's what we spent the morning discussing--not the book binding project but this one, a work in progress that has no real idea of its destination and this is where I am:

• this project is an attempt at smooth space (what I have termed 'smooth thought')/the application of the concept of smooth space in practice, 
• the performance will be that--a performance of smooth space (how? has still to come)
• connections between the three quilts in terms of similarities and difference (note: difference needs to be explored in terms of D&G, 'disparities' clearer)
• there are links 'in' time and 'through' time: friendships, personal connections, shared 'history', as well as ancestral time and evolutionary time [...this morning I came across the term homo temporalis that Hannah Arendt uses (but died before she explained its meaning), the author of a paper given at the University of Tasmania recently, surmises h. temporalis may have become 'initiators of stories about actions and events in the world'. I risk taking this term out of context in which it was used but it opens up intriguing possibilities for the types of connections and how they seem to operate in the hands of the three artists and their quilts]*.  
• high emotional intensity (within and between three works)...sensation? in D&G's terminology
• Emma's quilt opens up questions surrounding of the quilt form (does it or doesn't it comply), as do Pamela's 'Lost Birds' in their differences from her other work
• why did Emma decide on the Callan Park site? [A question to ask her]
• The void, the inbetween space: look at the Vedas (Pantanjali sutras)
• Tunnels, hidden things, layering, connections... 

*Coincidental link to the book of poems

Thank you Lisa!

Sunday, May 16

I picked up my most recent issue of American Craft magazine and found a review of the recent exhibition of quilts at the Quilt Centre, Nebraska. It has made me realise I need to include more links to the quilt medium (and to add 'studio quilt' as an alternative to 'art quilt' in my lexicon) as well as other media more often referred to as 'craft' (I had done this early on with my post on a visit to MAD, NYC).

It might be interesting to look through recent uses of American Craft/Fiberarts and identify links, a way to widen the (my) net, pun intended...I already have a list of interesting web addresses from a recent issue of Fiberarts that I made on a train journey to Sydney a few weeks back but hadn't listed them on this blog.

I am interested to see if I can find a means to plot/map loci/links as a visual representation of this project.

(Later) links under 'mind mapping' suggest I might be able to do it...

[in terms of this project overall--requires use of the internet (blog, documenting ideas, making links...) I'm finding it an exciting way to generating ideas creatively

Wednesday, May 19

I have set up age 'persons of interest' to list articles, websites and links where possible to widen my pool of reference--an attempt to keep things in one place (at least!).

Found in setting up this new page I could allow comments, not sure if this is a new feature as I'd like to add on other pages (such as this one) the same but can't work out how to.

'Someone' (who shall remain...) has shifted the google back to the previous one, ie not 'chrome' and I finding writing a post much slower, it's frustrating!! Now I need to find a way to reverse it.

(Later) My son has pointed out the difference between 'Google' the search engine, and 'Google Chrome' the web browser! That's how un-tech savvy I am, oh the ignominy of it but at least I've learnt something!

Thursday, May 20

I have spent today attempting to locate where I am with regards to this project. Lisa's questions a week ago made me realise how I needed to take the time to work this out. Giving this blog the nickname, 'Lost in Space' was becoming too much of a self-fulfilling prophesy. 

Thankfully I now realise how this project is fundamentally 'a study of space'--creative space, notions of space; how other artists explore space and how the quilt fits within these concepts of space.

I started with the theme of the conference, Textiles & Settlement: From plains space to cyberspace and by some luck I find myself still within that space (fortunately it's a limitless space...).

Another coincidence is that in their theory of 'smooth space', D&G identify  'migration' (specifically from Europe to the New World) as the driving force behind the development of the 'patchwork' quilt--an example of their 'smooth' space, from  the 'whole cloth' quilt--an example of their 'striated' space. Now quilt historians may argue with this point but that not the point I'm making here - (which is) - the conference is to be held in Lincoln, Nebraska - in the midst of the Great Plains and migration is central to their past...and maybe even their current identity--I shall have to wait and see.

Tuesday, May 25

It's taken me all afternoon to write up notes of my visit to the Sydney Writers' Festival on Friday, still time to think about media which has relevance to this project. Starting from the comment in the paper (SMH April 13) commenting on blogs as detrimental to fiction...we are continually being warned TV/film will destroy book, video will destroy film and so on...forms are move likely to adapt/change, as effect of printing press had on availability. Brings to a wider audience, recent work of 'The Red Room' illustration of this. 

I feel I need to do work on the individual quilts--perhaps I could 'post' a link from one to another chronologically?

...The space, the gap, ambiguity, doubling, ambivalence, lost and missing. 

Wednesday, June 2

Two days ago I found a nest at the door to my studio. There had been two days of high winds and so I looked around and wondered where it could have come from. But the way it was placed was somehow too 'perfect' for it to be a coincidence, so someone must have left it there.

Now I have more of the story - yes someone had found it on the grass and placed it by my studio door as a gift - and I am now wondering what sort of bird could have built it. I live with birds all around me...lorikeets, rosellas, king parrots, cat birds, bower birds, various kinds of owls, pigeons, cockatoos both black and sulphur crested, bell birds...so I have many to choose from.  A connection to the 'Lost Birds' to think about (possibly!). 

Friday, June 11-Saturday, July 3

A journey to Switzerland, Florence and Rome

Saturday, June 12-Saturday, June 19

View from our balcony

Cold, wet and misty: Le Grand Chamossaire

Hiking in the mountains (Solalex-Les Ernets) 

Saturday, June 19

To Florence via Aigle, Geneva and Frankfurt

Courtyard Garden, Hotel Orto De'Medici

Sunday, June 20

Visit Pisa

Pisa Duomo

Thursday, June 24

Calcio Storico Fiorentino

Friday, June 25

San Marco

Fra Angelico

Wednesday, June 30

Audience with the Pope

Thursday, July 1

Visit to the Vatican Museums and Sistine Chapel

I think this statue is called: 'fertility' and as soon as I saw it, it reminded me of a work by Louise Bourgeois, A Banquet/A Fashion Show of Body Parts (1978). 

It was enroute to Florence I heard of Louise Bourgeois' death on May 31 aged 98. She is on-going inspiration and role model. 

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Monday, July 19

time to get back to work (seriously!), in only eleven weeks the paper will have to be written and the presentation organised. The issue of 'performance' is still unclear.

Oh the power of writing!

Looking through a book on Louise Bourgeois (I had taken it down from the shelf to search for the connection with the statue I'd seen in the Vatican Museum) I realised  that Bourgeois made a number of 'performance' works--but--I haven't thought about this aspect of her work...which surely is significant? 

She Lost It (1992) made a big impression on me when I saw the video at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney some time ago.

Yes! I may have an important connection here, see for yourself!

And this, and more!

Thursday, July 22

What a day! In attempting to redress an inadvertant change in template and missing the all important 'save current template' I found I had lost much of the material (including this page and all the other pages) I have been working on in the past few months.

A number of lessons to be learnt here (inluding the need to copy content onto my hard drive...) and many hours as well.

But all's well and many many thanks to Brenda Gael Smith who dropped whatever she was doing and came to my rescue!

Monday, August 2

This afternoon I finished reading 'Beatrice and Virgil' by Yann Mantel. Wow, as I finished the last pages I felt as if I had had the breath knocked out of me. It really is an amazing book on a number of levels. Like his previous 'Self' and 'Life of Pi', the narrative reads as a deeply personal one ('self'had me checking the internet to see if any of the details were autobiographical...they were not! But I was left doubting the internet and not the apparent authenticity of the narrative. To add further credibility, in both 'Self' and 'Beatrice and Virgil' the narrator is a writer.

In this (B&V), Mantel seemingly achieves the impossible--how to touch on something that is beyond words.

Monday, August 9

Last night I watched the 'First Tuesday Book Club' on ABC2, by chance and, also by chance they had read 'Beatrice and Virgil'. Not one of the participants had a good word to say for it. And this surprised me, given the effect it had had on me when I read it. Richard Flanagan spoke up about the issue of prizes (Mantel's 'Life of Pi' having won the Booker) and all of them spoke about 'Beatrice and Virgil' having been a book about the Holocaust. Mantel makes no claim and although it is easy to jump to that conclusion (as well as the wide spread reviews that discussed the book in these terms). No one mentioned the play within the story and the dialog between Beatrice, a donkey and her best friend Virgil, a howler monkey. the negative response to the book appears (to me) to be much greater than what it, the book, claims to be--a book about the Holocaust (maybe having a 'silencing' effect that Mantel touches on in his narrative)...is it not also about friendship and paradoxically, also about humanity/inhumanity?

In the past few days I've been thinking over the how I will take this experience (writing a blog) and process it into the paper I will present in two months time. I realise I am both observer AND the observed! I look both ways, finding myself in that interstitial space.

In 'Thousand Plateaus' D&G do not refer to this space in these terms but I have found reference to the 'itinerant' who moves between, those who are neither 'sedentary' nor 'nomadic' in their terminology:

They are not of the land, or the soil, but of the subsoil. (456) 

And they give the artisan as 'the first and primary itinerant'(454) with the  (metal) smiths as their specific example, who operate (as do all artisans) within a 'holey space'. Seems like time to explore that space... 

Tuesday, August 10

Does 'performance' come out of that inbetween space?? 

Thursday, August 12

Of dear, another of 'those' days, not quite as bad as July 22 when I lost this whole blog completely, but bad enough as when I went to preview a posting ('Casting the net') I have spent today researching and writing, I found it had not saved! All gone, nowhere to be found. So I have spent the last couple of hours attempting to reconstruct it from memory, and I suspect the final posting is a shortened and distilled account of the original.

So what's the lesson? 

Keep checking the posting has 'saved' itself, I think it may have had something to do with my wireless connection (always uncertain in my studio). And I need to remind myself to make more (handwritten) notes as I go, as on July 22, I find myself having relied too heavily on the technology.

Tuesday, August 17

Yesterday I realised Louise Bourgeois (this is a potentially useful link and commentary on her work) and her series the Cells--extraordinary installations consisting of wire cages containing an assortment of objects--can be connected with the three quilts I am exploring in this blog...memory, the home-space/institutions, the prison cell, the padded cell of the mental hospital filled with the terrifying visions experienced by those suffering from psychosis.  

Sue Lawty  (oh my goodness, a plethora of images! and a good demonstration of the post I wrote today on the 'Virtual curator in smooth space'!) for very different reasons. I saw her 'Concealed--Discovered--Revealed' at the V&A some years ago. This series (exhibition) was full of 'connections'--to the museum collections, to other textile practices, to the natural process which shape the land (...relevant to Pamela Fitzsimons' work)...abrasive cutting/folding/piecing/fragmenting, and my own fascination with the processes of making, classifying, with text/threads of connection/personal narrative/collective and private histories. AND a really wonderful blog!

Wednesday, August 18

I have spent this morning analyzing the 'sitemeter' statistics: I have now had 397 visits since I attached the meter on February 24. The most noticeable feature was how much the visits fell off during the time I was away (June 11-July 13) and it only seems now that the visits (on a by week basis) are beginning to build up again, conclusion being...you have to keep the posts going otherwise interest declines quite sharply--and--this would also suggest I am getting the same people returning and the possibility of 'social network'--many of the same people returning over time.

NOTE: the 'sitemeter' can be found at the bottom left hand corner of this blog, you can check out numbers of visitors as well as their location and a number of other details.

Thursday, August 19

Today the guidelines for the paper/presentation arrives and after weeks of wondering how to structure the paper/performance, the title of the session provides one! I can't see this as intentional on the organizers part, I see it as a lucky break on mine! It allows me to structure it around the things that interest me most...the telling of story, structure, the form and structure of space.

Monday, August 24

I was returning from a two hour (marathon) session at the dentist and I found myself listening to 'All in the Mind' on ABC Radio National...I heard:  'networks'... 'connections'...'colour'...'my work'...'neurones'...a visual artist? a scientist? who was speaking? 

It turned out to be the writer A S Byatt and her subject, neuroscience.

I drove on past my driveway to hear the interview through to the end!

It was fascinating and luckily the audio is on the ABC website, so I can listen to it again from the beginning.

Tuesday, August 24

Change to structure/organisation of blogs--I will place all posts on this, Quilted Out of Space, blog and catalog each post to  blog if relevant to a specific work/artist: Love Will Nail You to the Cross, The Lost Birds Series, or Reconfiguring the Wall. 

This represents a change in organisation--keeping all posts together on the same blog, and overcoming shortfalls in blog design (I have only updated this blog, the others have structural instabilities which I will need to contend with when I have more time). The search options I have added since first setting up this blog allow me to make connections on the one blog.

I have now only five weeks until I leave for Nebraska, so  my mind is working on the presentation. And I also have a number of 'post' I hope to add: 'The Cabinet of Curiousites', '5 Places to Begin...', 'On Performance/Space of the other'...as well as identifying links to works by other artists on this blog's 'Connections' Page.

Today I ordered a printed copy of my/this blog...making the virtual a reality and, a way of overcoming the inherent anxiety associated with the possibility of losing the blog.

Wednesday, August 25

Now for a series of short Posts--I have too many to catch up on!

Sunday, August 20

In terms of the paper, I'm thinking of attempting to use only the content from this blog, interesting challenge as it means I also have to add any details (and argue for them in the writing) in order to utilize, pluses on all sides. I have added the three pages on the major works I have chosen and this has helped me look at the words in details and focus on themselves in addition to those I have encountered in the process of setting up and writing this blog.

I came across the work of Hany Armanious quite by chance while waiting for an appointment, by chance (also) I had the magazine at home and had missed the article. His work is open to some controversy, he has already been chosen for the 1993 Venice Biennale and has been chosen again for the 2011 event. Reviews of his work have elicited such comments as, 'puerile and depressing', 'bereft of meaning' and  he himself has been called a 'joker'. In stark contrast another critic has commented, 'that so much poetry can be won out of such simple elements cuts short the work of interpretation'. By Incorporating the word 'uncanny' in his title (as he did with his exhibition Uncanny Valley 2009), Armanious places his work in this realm of interpretation and Freud's unheimlich.   As I have already discovered, D&G do refer the Freud so I need to understand the connections between their work and his (as it forms a connection between my own previous work and this). The concept of the 'uncanny' is useful in understanding the responses to the studio/art quilt (Pia's article itself sounded 'uncannily' like a review of Craig Judd's review of Judy McDermott's exhibition 'The Big House: Go To Gaol' (1999)  in the Object Magazine 3/99, 29-30. 

Put (very)  simplistically, in my understanding... 'we don't know quite how to respond to this sort of work...it unnerves us, it's not quilt as we'd expect'...it's uncanny.

(I'm referring to Sigmund Freud's essay on the uncanny written in 1919, volume 14 of the Penguin Freud Library, published in 1985).

Sunday, August 29

Nick came to my rescue!

After battling the (small) size of font when editing/posting material on this blog for some weeks, I asked Nick to look at the problem when he visited at the week-end.

He picked the problem in an instant:

• Press 'control' (ctrl) at the same time as moving the wheel on the 'mouse' away from you and the size of the font increases!

No more squinting at the screen while I type--it works with whatever program you're using...except if you have a 'mac' when the process is much simpler.

Thank you Nick!

Monday, August 30

Ruth has left a fantastic comment on my recent post: Wunderkammer/Wundernet. My reply is multivalent...

And I should start with the title of my session referred to in my blogbook entry on August 19: Ruth points out that I refer to it without saying what it is:

Cyber Space: Art Yarn to Fiber R/Evolution

And I see the structure of my paper/presentation forming around this title as something like the following:

•  Cyber Space: it occurred to me the other day that 'to perform is to inhabit another space, another reality' and in this project I am creating a quilt in an alternative space to the physical one, that of cyber space. My working definition of space connects to my previous research (associated with alternative narratives within the domestic--the house, the home. My subtext continues to be one of the 'woman as artist' and the act of reclaiming this space; rather than seek a reductive definition (continuing on from Merskimmon, p2 who picks up from Griselda Pollock) of homogeneity, I am searching for alternative and heterogeneous spaces--and--thus this links to this, my current project.
• I have not sought to confine my exploration to only that art made by women as anyone who reads this blog will point out! I have an  ongoing interest to the unwritten, unspoken, hidden.'Space' and 'place' are framed within Michel de Certeau as: 'word' and 'language'...here multiple histories become superimposed, the multiple traces folding back on each other and becoming inexorably entwined...trace becoming closer to 'forensic' trace (which uncannily 'breaks' a dream I had last night in which this blog figured for the first time--in my dream the blog appeared as the 'scene of a crime' and I was attempting to interpret it as a means of 'solving it'...). Furthermore (and finally), I take 'space' to be where repetitions and re-assemblage creates tessellations that influence ongoing rituals and behaviors within a given space...within cyberspace I am working with the hypothesis that: the (hyper)links made  between the individual works in this project and other objects/ideas/individual artists/texts made through the process of the weblog will have the potential to set up pattens of similarities and dissimilarities/disparities will will be a useful tool in locating 'other' ways of writing about the processes of quiltmaking...
• Art Yarn: I am working with an alternative meaning of 'yarn' as 'a talk', 'a chat', 'a long rambling story' (OED). This is a telling of story as a creation of meaning (text and textile being related in the etymological sense and, in mythology women often play a central role in weaving or stitching together of meaning...fate is spun as thread, magical shirts are woven from nettles, Penelope stitches then un-stitches....). For the purposes of this project this telling of story will occur using the discourses of art/culture and the writing of Deleuze and Guatarri and in particular their notions of 'smooth' and 'striated' space. Like all stories, there are already themes of love and loss, the journey (across/through time) and the possibility of redemption...
• Fiber: as  threads of connection...the hyper-link and, 'fiber' as a 'structure that can be spun or woven' (OED)...thus the weblog as a structure for creating (and analysing) the quilt in cyberspace, that is, one quilted-out-of-space
• R/Evolution: a different way of looking, the three quilts I have chosen for this project open up all sort of possibilities in the ways they are connected in similarity/disparity that I did not know before I started this project. 
• What I do know now is that it is: To Be Continued

I think I have touched on some of these ideas in the Page: 'About this project'.. I can make links between the Posts but I haven't yet found a way to connect between the Pages of the blog. So the reader will need to read the various sections, too much to ask.Until then I'l attempt to make cross-references in the writing.

But what I do appreciate is Ruth's 'comment'. At the start of the project I had thought I would have set up some on-going conversations which would feed back into new Posts--this has only happened a couple of times. I know people visit from the 'sitemeter' but few leave comments. It's an idea I'd like to explore more as I develop this blog further. 

Is it the structure of the blog which inhibits interaction? 

Are there ways to encourage it?

Thank you Ruth!

Wednesday, September 1

The first day of spring, surely there is hope in that?

More analysis of the sitemeter: it certainly looks as if I write more posts in a week

•  the number of visits increase
• as do the page views (significantly)
• it follows that each visit is longer

I've also plotted the number of visits (per week) by the number of blog posts (in total) in order to see if there is a relationship between the 'size' of the blog and the visits--but--I think any relationship is related to the frequency of posting.

And this would certainly be the case if the blog was getting returning visits as my first look at the sitemeter statistics suggested (Blogbook: Wednesday, August 18).

Note: I've been attempting to find a way of including the graphs (done on 'Excel'), without luck so far.

I believe what I'm doing here is an example of the use of 'striated space' unlike most of tis blog which links in its process to 'smooth space', mind you as D&G point out:

"...we must remind ourselves that the two spaces in fact exist only in mixture: smooth space is constantly being translated, transversed into striated space; striated space is constantly being reversed, returned to a smooth space." (ATP,p524)

More on 'wonder': I've had a response to Ruth's comment continuing on in the back of my mind. I think that's the link I'm making...'wonder' as in 'wunder'--a sense of wonder that I associate with these works (and Pamela's work in general), in a visceral sense and it's much more than the term 'cabinet of curiosities' would suggest. The 'leap of association' came when I saw the image of Scott's Mitchell's Newcastle Cabinet in John McDonald's article with it's central image of Louise Weaver's contribution to the cabinet:

"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"

Monday, August 6

On Friday I met Emma at the art gallery and she gave me more images from her project. Now, working through them (approx. 300) I am getting a better idea of how the design developed, how the drawing-in of the boundary wall translated into the final design for the buidlings. How the walls prevented those inside from getting out...how the ha-ha walls allowed those 'inside' to look out over the Parramatta River, but 'outsiders'  not to look in:

Diagram of the ha-ha wall

(Reconfiguring the wall: research material)

One issue we did also discuss was to avoid the use of images showing individuals. There has been bad publicity concerning 'Facebook' the social networking site and this has raised anxiety about any sites (including blogs) on the internet.

I had established form the beginning in this blog, I would only use images with artist's permission, except of course those readily available on the web from sites, such as those set up by museums which allow material to be downloaded.

It is, however, a thorny question and something the blogger her/himself must consider for themselves...I was surprised how few visitors leave comments when they visit (and looking at the research on blogs, my experience is not that unusual). From the 'sitemeter' I can track visitors but how I would love to hear what they think! 

Tuesday, August 7

Seems Em's and my discussion about the internet was timely--the current issue of 'The Economist' arrived in the post today.

This week's lead article is: 'The Future of the internet: A virtual counter-revolution':

The internet was a wide-open space, a new frontier. For the first time, anyone could communicate with anyone else--globally and essentially free of charge. Anyone was able to create a website or an online shop, which could be reached from anywhere in the world using a simple piece of software called a browser, without asking anyone for permission. The control of information, opinion and commerce by governments--or big companies, for that matter--indeed appeared to be a thing of the past. (p71) [see 'persons of interest' for full reference]

Now, fifteen years later, however, this seems to be changing...governments, IT companies, and network owners and the internet has become 'internets' fragmenting along geographical and commercial boundaries.

In another article in the same issue ('A cyber-house divided', p59-60) suggests that rather than connecting groups  separated in the physical world: 'People are online are what they are offline: divided, and slow to build bridges'. To me the most pertinent part of this article is just that...people are what they are wherever they are.

Bringing to mind something else, a point which intrigues me:

• in the 'enigma of the unconscious' Edgar Levensen [I am attempting to obtain a copy of the full article] suggests the structure of the internet resembles the structure of the unconscious mind...surfing the internet is similar to the way seemingly unrelated topics come to mind 
• it seems that in the development of artificial intelligence, the most successful developments so far replicate the way the human nervous system operates

...to look outside of ourselves we re-produce the inside of ourselves. I remember Jung saying something similar at the end of 'Man and his symbols' only I can't find my copy and it's certainly many years since I first read it. 

I am still not ready to leave the topic of the 'cabinet of curiosities', I have discovered 'Macquarie's Chest' is on view in the NSW State Library along with another, the 'Dixson Galleries collectors' chest'.  I now also have a copy of a very beautiful new book, 'Rare and Curious: The Secret History of Governor Macquarie's Collectors' Chest' by Elizabeth  Ellis. I find even more possible connections to the quilts I focus on in this project.


(Later) I have added a 'gadget' on the right hand side of the blog: 'A Guide To This Blog' to explain the contents of each of the Pages (elements) making up this blog with the hope that visitors will be encouraged to look around. 


Wednesday, September 7
I've finally finished my most recent Post ('Wonder (4)'). I'm pleased I left it in draft overnight because I've realised the obvious--I was connecting the Lost birds to a cabinet of curiosities and this Ruth rightfully challenged. 
I then inadvertently linked the blog to the cabinet in my response and then my Blogbook entry made yesterday brought together these ideas--I have been  using the blog to: "..help [me] struggle for the ordering of [my] own experience'', a quote I have already used from Helmut Lueckenhausen's essay on the wunderkammer (p36, Craft & Contemporary Theory) and thus the cabinet and the blog act as metaphors for the working of my mind.
Other people might make completely different connections using the same objects and the same process of writing a blog. This blog is not only a personal journal, a filter (for other web-based material), or a notebook (types of blog suggested by Herring et al in 'Bridging the Gap: A Genre Analysis of Weblogs, 2004), it's a mix of all these and more--a filing cabinet, perhaps even (if I work at it), a wunderkammer.


Time to start writing the paper, the material is all here...writing-on-the-flat page/screen seems much less interesting than writing in a blog with its possibilities for making connections in space, inside and outside of the text itself!


Thursday, September 9
And yes, I've begun! All of a sudden while looking at Janet Laurence's work [Connections] I felt ready. So far it's spilling onto the page (screen) incoherent, rambling but I'll worry about that later. It has all the possibilities of story: strong characters, varied voices, colour, events, contrast, conflict, disparity, more questions than answers. I found this amazing image of the internet on Wikipedia: 

Friday, September 10
Today has been a writing day! Then this afternoon i picked up an email from Emma with a reference to a project using a 'scrapbook' approach to writing  an academic article.
Called 'Postcard from the edge of empire' it's definitely worth a look. 
I need to work out a way to connect it to this blog...I've found  a link to the abstract.
Thank you Emma!


Saturday, September 11
Yes, it's a date that is engraved in our minds.


I'm starting to work through the reference Emma sent me (Postcard From the Edge) on  page 7 a sentence catches my attention:

Creative work requires a trust in oneself that is virtually impossible to sustain alone

This afternoon I'm going to a launch of the Henry Kendall Anthology for this years. I had submitted two poems for the prize (which I didn't win!) but I do have one of  my poems in the anthology and I've been asked to read it at the launch.
It's number 22 of 26 I wrote last year ("26 Poems I have Encountered" 2009):

Yesterday I cut the lavender bush

as short as my hair

is short

And boiled the leaves

To dye backing for a quilt

a wolf skin

The colour of evening rain clouds

But silk threads tangled in the process

And today I stand in the sun separating the long lengths

grey-blue-green and variegated

Shot through with silver

as my hair is streaked

with silver

But knotted beyond hope of use

And I stand here

in the sun

Tracing each strand through entwined others

A coffee cup balances on the upturned dye-pot

Music flows through the open door of my studio

I don’t know why I stand here unravelling

Silk thread but this is the only thing I need to do

With my life in this moment

Long and entangled beneath the rough touch

Of the brush I remember my hair as a child

But my fingers pull gently on this silk

And later I will stitch it

grey-green and silver

And all will become still again 

Getting back to the quote about creative work and being difficult to sustain on one's own and it reminds me that when I first set up thus project I'd expected more interaction, and that hasn't been the case. As Ruth pointed out, I think I drifted off task for a while--writing notes to myself which weren't necessarily particularly coherent to anyone else. I need to remind myself to look at the 'sitemeter' to see if in fact I've had any visitors and where they've come from in terms of their location (which anyone can do by clicking on the link on the very bottom left of the blog)....so I am not alone! But what is absolutely clear is that I need to keep writing 'posts' (...from the edge of cyberspace) to keep people visiting.  

As of today I think I may try writing the paper in terms of exerts from the blog, referencing each with where they came from in hte blog and when they were written.


Monday, September 13
Is Sept 13 lucky or unlucky? (I'm hoping the former.)


I went to the launch of the Central Coast Poets 2010 anthology ("off  the tracks") not sure what to expect.
...The unexpected!
I got a thrill having a name tag 'Sarah xxxxxx poet', what does it take?


Reminds me of something Judy wrote in a letter from Hill End after I had visited:

Lynette-who-runs-the-shop just called in--I was hand stitching on the verandah  - + wanted to know if I was mending? Not a painter, not a mender--what could I possibly be?  

(Letter from Judy McDermott to author postmarked 11 October 2000)

And the anthology itself is impressive, well printed and the group a mixture of the committed (and published, is that what allows one to call oneself a poet?), I am thinking of applying for membership (I think my own writing has to be scrutinised by the committee before they let one join). It would certainly be a way of keeping motivated. 


The paper: constantly on my mind and yes, it's still using exerts from this blog, keeping me 'posting' too...!

Tuesday, September 14
I've been wondering why each of the artists make quilts in particular?
For Judy there was no question--quilts were 'women's work' and making them connected her to the past, made her part of the whole.
I've emailed Emma to ask her, I think it has to do with the fragment--the medium and its associations--memory...
Pamela has called her work: "contemporary quilt textiles" (Time and Place, solo exhibition at  Manly Art Gallery & Museum, 2006)

Frogmouth Owls on the tree outside my studio September 13

Yesterday the frogmouth owls returned, I saw 'the' because I firmly believe it is mother and chick (now grown) we rescued from the driveway the year before last, They returned days later to this very tree, then last year came regularly to the trees below the house. Or are they Boobooks? I need an expert here. And their presence is reassuring; the wonder of living in such a place. A connection to the whole...

The paper Emma (Postcard from the Edge (of Empire)) sent me is proving interesting, their key words: collaboration; embodiment; feminist methodology; image theatre; performativity; postcards; post-colonialism.

Put simply (I think) their aim is to subvert the: "...rigidities of academic convention...to challenge and confront its audience into dialogue" (abstract).

I find a resonance with this blogging project...the possibilities of the rhizome model vis-a-vie the hierarchical/cartesian--the blog is at the edge (in cyberspace), my aim to converse with ideas more often associated with the academic but with a broader purpose, that of opening up and refreshing ways quilts are perceived and written about.

The blog is, however, dis- rather than em-bodied...is that one of the reasons it is so difficult to get feedback??

And its by nature dynamic--it shifts, changes direction, 'finds' itself again, gets back on track without quite knowing which direction it's heading in!  

D&G's writings are of essence 'political' as they: "... engage with (institutional 0 forces such that their value is  created by critical evaluation"(Zepke & O'Sullivan, p5--which arrived in the post yesterday, talking about down to the wire!). I found I have been avoiding taking the political  to art, am I suspicious of it? Yet my intention has always been subversion and that's political, so perhaps now's the time to confront it. I seem to remember someone said, all art is political (I can't remember who, and small 'p' here, makes sense of a kind).



Wednesday, September 15

Postcards from a Past (2003)

The postcard appears to have possibilities, the challenge is to make the message meaningful. 


Monday, September 20
I spent Thursday in and out of MRI, Bone Scanner, and CT machines. Luckily I had Edgar Levensen's paper, 'The Enigma of the Unconscious' (Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 37, 2001) to occupy my mind (thank you Emma). Very relevant to this stage in the project--lots to say about 'space(s)'--the answer to the question(s) I was asking when exploring notions of space at the beginning of the project...it's 'hyperspace'! 
Which ties together with hyper-link, hypertext in the blog and the notions of Non-Euclidean geometry I (started to) raise early on in the project. 
[I can't help also associating it with a more basic definition of the prefix, 'hype-' a state of increased excitement as one leaps from one site to another in cyberspace!]
Levensen's paper will be v useful in bringing together ideas in the paper's conclusion (hopefully) I feel as if I'm beginning to feel the shape of the paper, it's now time to attempt to bring it into reality on the page/screen.


Then on Friday I had the experience of bringing all, the past, the present, my previous work, my fascination with the quilt, my embodied state and 'the mother'. 
Perhaps that will be the unexpected and most radical result of this project, the possibility of moving on...


I also went to the State Library of NSW on Friday and saw the 'Macquarie collector's chest' (c1818) referred to in my post on 'wonder' (Wonder (4), September 8) it's on display in an exhibition, 'The Governor'  an amazing collection of documents, images, objects from Macquarie's time as governor of NSW (1810-1821) with links to both The Big House quilts and Reconfiguring the wall.
Oh yes and Lost birds...
Unfortunately one can't see much of the collector's chest as most of the panels/drawers are closed, it's easier to look around it on the website on this link!
The Llewellyn Chest  (date: 2008?)is also on display. Maybe a little disappointing, I was expecting some leap in expressing ideas, more a reproduction (as in furniture).
Again: great timing!


Saturday: a concert by L'Arpeggiata a rich cloth  woven by the improvised threads of sound as the various instruments (...theorbo, drums, clarinet, strings, leone) baroque/17thC and improvised: rhythm, repetition. Folia, Ciaccona, Bergamasca. 


[Just checked the sitemeter, 600 visitors to this blog!]


'Virtual' vs 'digital': problem of embodiment (or lack of) in alternative dimensions of space...performance 'overcomes' this issue (?)


Tuesday, September 21
I have finally worked my way through the TSA website and located 'Author Guidelines' for the paper. I had thought the paper had to be submitted the same day as the presentation (October 6). NO! The deadline is December 1 2010!
What a load off my mind! I can spend the next few days concentrating on the presentation and getting that correct.
As well as discussing the project at the conference and developing the paper form there.


Wednesday, September 22
Looking at the most recent sitemeter stats I realise how sensitive the frequency of visitors is to my frequency of updates.
This week I hadn't added a Post but i have been updating the various pages as I look for links between the quilts and think myself through the presentation. As a result I've added a new 'gadget' to the sidebar: 'Recent Additions to Pages' to which I will add the date each time I make additions to that page. Time consuming but worth a try.


When I went out for some food (the larder is getting remarkably bare!) I turned on the radio and came in midway a reading, the 'voice' (I had no idea who it was speaking), a female and a writer, was discussing  embodied creativity/voice. Turned out to be Suri Hursvedt reading one of her essays (the title of the collection bing something to do with 'Eros') which tapped into my thoughts on embodiment.
My copy of Meskimmon's 'Women Making Art' is next to me on the table as I write and I find I have marked (although I don't remember doing so):

'...language is like a skin, both on the [in?] side of the body and  out-side the body, between the body and the world, but also of the body, in the world.'  (p102)

Merskimmon is quoting Elizabeth Meese ((Sem)Erotics 1992) I have added [in?] as I wonder if there is a typo in Meskimmon's book. Don't know.

Thursday, September 23
Finally, thank goodness, finally the presentation is coming together.

And now I've located some statistics on cyberspace: 126 million blogs (2009), since growth is (was thought to be exponential there will now be many more, how many?).

My sitemeter stats show quite a different geographic distribution to these, porabaly goes to show article in the Economist mentioned in my Blogbook entry for August 7--ie the internet is distributed along geographic lines (far from being the utopian, border-less entity first imagined). One of the explanations for this blogs location stats maybe that visitors come about through word-of-mouth, not chance.

I found Pamela's comment on this page today.
Fantastic! May the conversation begin.

Sunday, September 26
I've been writing writing the paper for Lincoln. After the first terror, sleepless nights, getting up in the early hours and writing the words circulating in my brain--it's stared to come together.
It (the paper) can only be a fraction of what is on this blog, a snap shot. 
I realised tonight that yes, the post card structure is still there--I have written the paper from the blog, cutting & pasting blocks of text.
Why do I do it if I have to go through the sleepless nights, good question. 
There is a certain euphoria to be in the 'writing zone' then I remembered the quote I'd found from Gregory Orr's poems (the book that is the body of the beloved) that I quoted in an early blog post (April 20, 2010):


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)

Yes it sings a song, the writing sings 'me'.

Monday, September 27

A realisation that in returning to the unconscious, I have returned to the place (the site) I've been before--adding or subtracting knowledge as I go--undeniably my interest is in the unconscious--it's unpredictability, its disparities, a roller-coaster of potential "what lies beneath..." that Marilynne Robinson quote that became the mantra for Reconfiguring the Wall.

Up and about at 2am, sorting re-sorting words! I came across notes in my notebook (still in use when I'm separated from my laptop. How Pamela's work doesn't allow time to 'disappear' (back to the Elizabeth Grosz quote on the Lost birds blog 'Page' how: Time is rarely analysed or self-consciously discussed in its own terms).

Levensen's comment about hyper-text: the polycentric, synchronic world of the web (p244)--to which I would add, the quilt and smooth space also.

I have associated 'synchronic' with synchronicity:

The idea of synchronicity is that the conceptual relationship of minds, defined as the relationship between ideas, is intricately structured in its own logical way and gives rise to relationships that are not causal in nature. These relationships can manifest themselves as simultaneous occurrences that are meaningfully related.

Synchronistic events reveal an underlying pattern, a conceptual framework that encompasses, but is larger than, any of the systems that display the synchronicity. The suggestion of a larger framework is essential to satisfy the definition of synchronicity as originally developed by Carl Gustav Jung (from Wikipedia)

Which has an interesting co-incidence with  Jung's  idea of the structure of the cosmos...how it  reflects the structure of the unconscious that I had mentioned in a post (but I have still to locate 'Man and his Symbols' hopefully I may find a copy when in the US).

I started off thinking I may have found a way to get away from the quilt as a 'symptom', in D&G's theories, then came across this comment in Deleuze's Essays Critical and Clinical:

Moreover, the writer as such is not a patient but a physician, the physician of himself and of the world. The world is a set of symptoms whose illness merges with man. (p3)

A fridge magnet I found at the State Library of NSW:

It came as an answer to the question (in the title of the session) about R/Evolution: the blog represents an evolution to my research/writing practice.

But the realisation about the 'quilt preforming me' is  revolution.

Tuesday, September 28

Last night I found a quote I've been looking for for a while--I found it marked by a receipt dated 20/11/04 which has become lodges in the fold between the pages (so yes, it looks like I've been searching for six years...) worth it though, it's a quote on wonder from 'When the Moon Waxes Red' by Trinh T Minh-Ha: 

Wonder never seizes, never possesses the other as its object. It is the ability to see, hear, and touch, to go towards as though always for the first time. (p23)

I've spent most of today attempting to set up the power-point presentation for the paper (how come I'm so un-technological and plan to give a paper on use of the internet??).

I'm so tired, I need to go to bed.

Thursday, September 30

Tomorrow we leave!

Yesterday I read through my presentation (out loud) and found myself well over time). So I have pared down some of the sections and dropped one (consisting of a reading of the last Post I wrote within the context of 'wonder'. I means I can spend longer going through the quilts and perhaps discuss the blog itself in more detail. It'll flow better to I think.

I am hoping to put together another meditation square to take with me as I finished the one I was working on--I need (or rather, have a need) to stitch at some time during each day and it's now a few days since I have.

Saturday, October 2

We have arrived in Lincoln via Los Angeles and Denver.

This morning we walked the streets around the hotel--great coffee in the old quarter at 'indigo blue cafe and bookstore'.  Seems to be lots of students around--wide streets.

Tuesday, October 26

So we're home again, I tidied my studio on Saturday (I had left it in a mess after the rush to prepare to leave) and most of the practicalities have been achieved (roundabout way of saying...I've caught up with the things I'm meant to do before I get down to the things I love to do!). The night before last I woke in the early hours with words racing through my mind...the need to write...there's so much to process after Lincoln, presenting the paper, talking to so many people...perhaps it's lucky that the two boxes of books I sent haven't arrived yet.

The first thing I did, before even tidying my studio was to start 'making' something: folding and preparing some signatures for a book covered with Japanese silk I had found in the 'Trader's Market' at the conference (I had met and talked at length with John Marshall who specializes in Japanese textiles and natural dyes and printing techniques--it had some beautiful silks for sale but most of them by the roll, then he showed me some short lengths: the right size for making the cover for small books:

I used the reverse side and as he also had some gold thread, I have reinforced the central page of each of the signatures as an experiment to see if I can use gold thread (lower right of image) to stitch the books:

And there is so much else to think and write about: the International Quilt Study Center, the conference itself (there are lots of images from the conference on this link), the many conversations, the  sessions I attended (mostly on weaving, the ones on quilts were in parallel with the one in which I presented), a seminar at the IQSC given by Marin Hanson, the curator of exhibitions...a challenge given out at the opening reception to suggest quilts from outside of the USA to be added to the collection...

And now the presentation has been written and given (the paper itself is still to be completed and submitted by December 1), I intend to re-think the future direction for this blog. 

PS the gold thread didn't work, it unraveled while attempting to stitch the signatures together. What started off as a simple and quick project to get myself back into the studio, took a lot longer as I started to think about the book as a form of physical poem and added text and fragments of silk through the book.

Monday, November 15

Oh dear I've taken longer than I expected to get back to writing. Fate intervened--a family member seriously ill and in hospital.

Meanwhile a series of potential subjects for future 'posts', perhaps the first: 'is there such a thing as an art quilt??'. While being (intentionally) provocative, I am also serious in asking the question...is it really possible to distinguish one from the other? Or perhaps I am asking, is it really possible to discriminate and separate one from the other?

While I was in Lincoln, I picked up a book by Claire Campbell Park, 'Creating with Reverence: Art, Diversity, Culture and Soul'. I have only just started reading it and already the stories seem to resonate within, I admit I find it impossible to separate aspects of life with the making of art, whether that be writing, stitching or spending time with a friend in my studio making a book.  

PS I don't intend this blog to be a vehicle for advertising but Claire Park emailed me this morning to say her book is on sale on Amazon (http://www.amazon.com/Creating-Reverence-Diversity-Culture-Soul/dp/1439262047/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1262655067&sr=8-1). I'm not sure how Claire got my email address (through TSA prehaps) but I'm pleased she did--I have written back hoing to start a conversation!

Thursday, November 18

Deleuze may well offer a way of getting around the art/craft debate (which seems to haunt me, no matter how i claim it's a waste of time!). 

Any system of classification is predicate in 'difference' and subordinated to 'sameness' --an object of representation in relation to some identity (p72, Deleuze Dictionary). Deleuze proposes a 'difference-in-itself', that does no rely on 'sameness'. Thus an object can't be categorized as either art or craft as attempting to do so presupposes its comparison with some preexisting and idealized 'art' or 'craft'  object.

By naming something 'a quilt', the artist makes a reference (whether intentionally or unintentionally) to a form associated with with certain tradition (and history)...it comes with baggage which can get mired in terms of questions of art or craft.

Perhaps viewing in terms of difference-in-itself, and the dropping of distinctions between itself and others might be helpful here.

I would drop such distinctions/limitations in terminology, open up (rather than close) categories.

Perhaps I have a blind-spot here which I should admit to--I have difficulty telling the difference between a quilt and an 'art' quilt (perhaps it comes down the the term 'art'  at all, as I find that impossible to define except in vague transcendental terms), like Deleuze I am more interested in 'sensation' (feeling...).

Thursday, December 2

So the paper has been sent--it turned out to be much more difficult than I expected to write, I really struggled with it and now it's done and I need to get back to developing this blog. I've had interest from someone who came to the presentation in Lincoln who is running a class on textile artists and their use  of social networking.

And the owl and chick have flown! I've been watching them out of the window as I sit at my writing desk and now they're no longer there--but--I managed to get a photograph of them just before they left:

I've noticed the formatting is beginning to break down on this page--perhaps it's getting too long and I should set up another, say 'Blogbook #2'. 

Exciting news today, the IQSC are interested in a submission on contemporary Australian quilts for their collection!

Monday, December 13

Time to get back to the blog (how many times have I written that?)

• I've decided to start a new Blogbook page for 2011
• Get the post on the definition of an art quilt written--I've found the Selvedge article I was looking for: 'Bedmates: do modern quilt makers need a wake-up call?' by Susan B Marks (Issue 33  march/April 2010) using the IQSC exhibitions: 'Quilts in Common' (March 30 - April 17, 2008) and, 'South Asian Seams' 
• The article and these two exhibitions open up some interesting questions/ideas