Does the Art Quilt exist?

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!

'On' and 'another' matter

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

Midnight in the Garden of Academe (2004)

by

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.

Wunderkammer/Wundernet

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...

Sue Lawty: World Beach Project

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

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

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)

That In-Between Space

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

Sifting & Sorting

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'.

Smooth Thought

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

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.