A Real Pretend Wagga for Paul Klee

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

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

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

In Judy's own words:

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

(Artist's statement, Quilt National 1999)

Horizontal lines are present in a number of Judy's quilts--in the 'Big House' series as prison bars, in the 'Quilting Hill End ' series as picket fences that
surround the miners' cottages in Hill End, and as a design feature as in this quilt and the number of others in which she experimented with colour.

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

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

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

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