Is the past a foreign country?

So this is where it starts. An exhibition of quilts from India, Pakistan & Bangladesh, South Asian Seams at the International Quilt Center & Museum. I was in Lincoln, Nebraska for the Textile Society of America conference where I first presented research on quilts and this blog. I had walked through the first room past quilts from Bangladesh, West Bengal, Bihar, Maharasahtra, Karnataka, Rajasthan, Gujarat--then round a corner into the second room, and here it was a charpoy (bed/day bed) covered with a quilt from Southern Sindh in Pakistan. The applique technique is a hallmark of the work of the Muslim Charhan quilters, which often includes mirrors and sequins. This quilt was made sometime between 1950 and 1980.
Yet that's the technical part, my response to coming across the charpoy extends even wider and deeper than my interest in quilts...all of a sudden

Collaboration

A few months ago a friend who lives some distance away visited me in my studio and brought with her some of her embroidery to show me. We decided to work on a collaboration--she would bead some cloth and then I would make a book using the cloth for the cover. We agreed on A6 as an approximately size. Weeks later a exquisite beaded piece of silk arrived and I began to wonder if I had bitten off more than I was prepared for...I make books that are imperfect: papers of varous types, papers hand-cut and folded, no one book the same size as the next. What is more, the cloth was stripped

New Posting: The Big House

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

See 'Restorative Justice' July 15: The Big House

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

#2 75x110cm, #1 100x60cm

(Photograph A Payne)  

Where am I?

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


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

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

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


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


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

Abstract accepted!

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

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

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

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

Image: Sahoro, Hokkaido 2009

Quilting the Blog/Blogging the Quilt

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

My Studio, The Project (part 1)

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