Fibrearts Workshop with Glenys Mann

Glenys Mann, an Australian Art Textile Warrior ( not sure if she'd like that title) but I have bestowed it upon her. She has been at the forefront of contemporary fibre arts here in Australia for many years.

I had the pleasure of 3 days of her company and saw the Art Textile Biennale in Toowoomba  as well.

Her workshop didn't teach me a new technique, but I delved into the thought processes of an artist. Studied other Artists and along with the other 11 participants met new ones. 

The second day exercise was to speak about an artist you liked, and do a small project based on secret messages, pockets from that artist.

A few days before the workshop, I stumbled as you do, on a blog called Tanglewood Threads by Penny Berens of Nova Scotia, Canada.

Wow, I was amazed at her stitching, but her words and lack of them amazed me. Her messages still come through. Don't believe me, read her blog and you will understand my message.

Here are 2 photos of the beginning and end of my day2 assignment. Yes, I know its poor quality photography, I am working on that. Step 1 has arrived but am still waiting for a new camera.

 The secret message  has to do with paths, rocks and everything in between. Send me a message if you want to know more. 

House Repairs and Possible New Directions in Art and Photography

 I am sure you are familiar with the old house we moved into in 2010. This photo is from 2014 when I had finished painting the south eastern corner of the veranda. I am now in the process of finishing the north western side. I have spent hours removing paint, sanding the palings and railings down for more painting.

Work in progress, and I am happy to say a final sand with the finest grit paper is left for this panel. Then the arduous task of priming, undercoating and painting begins. Take a note of the floorboards here as well, they need replacing and my goal is to have the palings all painted before that happens so I don't have to put masking tape around each one of the palings before painting.

This shows the poor state of the post decoration prior to a sander being used on it.

This is the inside of the north east corner and I have a problem with the support beam. It has fallen down onto the post and is  hollow for about 15cms up the roof support beam. I think I will get some expander filler and place in there, hoping it will keep the roof up for awhile yet. Speaking about the roof, that is starting to get to be another big issue as it will probably start leaking next time it rains ( maybe there is an upside to a drought after all).

Back to my art. This is a poor quality photo taken on my iPad of a piece I made based on Mark Rothko's art. It is called Simplicity and was part of the Tangled Threads word challenges in 2017-2018.

It is made from 2 pieces of fabric. The dense quilting hides the seams and I attempted to make the piece look like a woven piece. I have always liked the weaving art of Ptolemy Mann and short of taking up weaving, I would like to make some textile pieces emulating it. I am yet to figure out a way to do that with the quilting threads. So I will keep experimenting in some new work. 

This piece was also in the Tangled Threads Word Challenge, called Habitat. I saw a similar piece on pinterest and tried 3 techniques in this piece. Mum has it on her wall in her Nursing Home giving her much joy to look at it.

The photography is pretty poor for both of these pieces, so I am currently researching ways to improve it. I already have a photography backdrop stand for quilts so am now investing in some lighting equipment to see if that improves the images using the small camera I have. If not, then maybe a new camera and some lessons in how to use it and maybe more lessons on photoshop for me.

More stuff to try and learn, it certainly is a busy journey.

Drought and Myself.

 Continuing the discussion about Drought, I wish to speak about the effects on my life. We seem to spend a considerable amount of time looking at weather maps, reading about the weather and hoping for some good rain to fall. We live in an area of Qld, Australia where the rainfall is supposed to be a bit more reliable than some other parts of Qld. You definitely would not think that at the present time and we know of people in the Wide Bay Burnett region considerably worse off than us.

This is reflected in many of my art pieces. I want to show you a photo I found on FB during the severe western Qld drought a few years back. I cannot acknowledge the owner as it was posted to the Who Got The Rain Group page and I could not "track them down" from there. It was too poignant a photo for me to ignore it. It was taken outside  Longreach showing the bare state of the grazing property with the stark storm clouds rolling in hopefully to deliver some very much needed rain. It shows the flatness of the horizon of outback Qld and it is something every Australian should make an effort to visit at least once in the lifetime ( the Outback as we call it).

I took this photo with me for my Working In A Series Class with Lisa Call (2016) as inspiration. After a few smaller pieces were made at the workshop, she suggested taking a different approach with colour.

I played around with colour  and came up with this piece. I have mounted it on canvas and it has been hanging in our lounge room ever since, where I walk past it numerous times a day and think of drought, Longreach and abstracted lanscapes and of course the WIA Series workshop with Lisa.

I want to show you another drought piece made in 2019 when we were still battling a severe drought in Spring that year. 

 Even in the driest of deserts you can find underground water if you know how to find it and there are enough dollars in your pocket to tap into it. Qld has the Great Artesian Basin under a lot of it and I can vividly recall my first shower at Charleville in 1980  when I was despatched to fill a work vacancy at the hospital there. The absence of a hot water  tap made me wonder at first, then I realised the temperature was fine as is, for a shower. The smell of sulphur was the killer at the time which left me thinking unless you were on tank water for showering we would all smell the same so don't worry about it. I very quickly got used to the water out there.

This piece is titled "Desert Water" showing there is water in a desert, and channels run through it when it rains. 

Now, just to show you my mind sometimes gets away from drought. After I made "Storm Clouds at Longreach",  I made this small 10" x 12" piece titled " Irish Skies"    I like the formation of the horizon in this piece. It was the first piece in my Tracks series where I used 2 different "blade" colours. I went onto make " Desert Skies" after this piece. All of these pieces hang in our lounge room, with only the Desert Water being recently exhibited. I did read somewhere about keeping the artistic pieces that give you most joy in your life, hanging where you can readily see them. Maybe I need to add an extension onto our house as I could add a few that meet that criteria. Do you have some favourite works that give you much joy? I hope so.

Drought and the Ninas

 Living in Australia, farmers are used to battling droughts, floods, bushfires and we somehow seem to manage to survive these extremes when they happen, whether you believe many of the current theories behind their causes or not. Weather is an important topic in our daily lives. This is evident from the number of private weather forecasters which have exploded on social media since the Australian BOM seems to have strayed from its main charter of predicting the weather. Last week the BOM had our area on flood watch, many days before the predicted rain event and again most desperate farmers were let down by the BOM when their predictions were wildly inaccurate for our region. Maybe they are trying too much to be accurate over a longer period before the predicted events, possibly concerned about legal ramifications if they are wrong ( as they always seem to be).

 What's this got to do with art you say? A lot because the weather affects your mood, affects your daily art practice and inspires you. A nice wet day promotes being indoors sewing instead of for me, outdoors working on restoring our house.  My next two artworks are a response to the weather. We hear so much in the media these days about the drivers for our weather, el Nino and La Nina. One meaning drought for us and one supposed to mean rain . I made  two pieces for my 2020 Wondai exhibit showing the weather extremes. I used copper foil in the focal area of the Drought piece to create a further inner frame. The landscape I used for inspiration is the view from our driveway as I returned home in late 2019. Even the ironbark and quinine trees were dying at that time.

When it does rain, the effects can be quite spectacular with the country turning green from fresh grass growth and trees responding. La Nina years seem to occur less than el Nino years so we try to drought proof the farms as much as possible by building dams and finding underground water to use.

This artwork was inspired by the many shades of green which delights the eye after a few decent falls of rain.

This is the view down Trentham Lane. A road leading to one of our paddocks which has a few gully crossings. Most of the time they are dry but occasionally they are like this.

This photo shows the colours of our soil, grass and trees when there is rain about providing inspiration for colour selection for more artwork.

Now the BOM are talking about polar vortexes, MJO oscillations as well,  being climate drivers, I will have to research more so I can find further inspiration in the weather.

Landscapes and Fiery Urban Remnants

 In 2017, I started making freestanding landscapes without the tracks movement. Wanting to create a focus area of the colour condensed into one point. I really liked the way my green landscape turned out. The fabric used for the blade colour was a darker blue black colour and this worked well with the greeens.

I wanted to try another using the grey fabric from some of the Tracks series and Yellow Landscape was created. Another Title for this could be "Fire Landscape".

 I then went on to try a second focal point of the condensed colours. This is actually the second make in these colours as the original didn't work out as I had hoped so I filled in where a focal point had been and this looks untidy.

In September 2018, Tangled Threads challenge was remnants and I wanted to create a second piece to possibly be included in the exhibition for 2019.  I liked the autumnal colours and came up with this. I called this one Fiery Urban Remnants as the news grabs of night skies during urban warfare showed flaming buildings lit up against the dark skies. This piece is mounted on canvas and has some vertical quilting in the 3 focus areas. Due to its size 18" H x 28 " wide I hand stitched it to a piece of felt, used diluted gel medium to glue the felt to the canvas leaving approx 2.5cms loose, then handstitched the piece to the canvas. Earlier pieces that have not been mounted this way, can sag a little away from the canvas when hung. This seems to prevent that from happening. I am still thinking that I may make another one similar but alter the size and placement of the middle focus area.   As with most of my artwork, they look better when hung on a wall and under good lighting.

I have been continuing working on my Incubator Program with Lisa Call, working on pieces for Tangled Threads, fitting in some house restoration projects ( back on the sander and paint brush). Our queenslander has 24 sets of veranda cornices which are attached to the posts and top beams on the veranda. Some I have finished repainting but 15 still need doing. The ravages of time were starting to show up on some of them so working on them is a priority now that the 10 french doors are finished. 

Here is a sample of timber ones available to use as new. Unfortunately our design is not amongst them so we would have to purchase 24 sets of them ready made or get them custom made so preservation is the next best thing.  The drought has still not finished, yes we have had some good rain but again, very little dam filling rain. I will show 2 pieces inspired by that topic next time.

Visibility

 "Visibility" - a word that has a few meanings, mostly to do with seeing, prominence etc.

In 2017 the Tangled Threads theme was set to a certain size 0.5m wide by 2.0m long. The person who set the theme envisaged long transparent pieces of fabric hanging in the centre of a room to be viewed from either side or transparent fabric covering a doorway.

To be honest, in the beginning I was a bit stunned to think somehow I had to try to merge my current work to this theme. The 2.0m length was certainly a challenge. This piece took me over 3 months of stitching to piece it and hours to quilt it. In my mind it is a drone's view of the streets in a town with the rows of houses and the intersections. Visibility is important when driving around the streets. The dotted line represents the road. I like the way from my fabric selection, the values drift in and out of visibility.

This piece glows with luminosity when it is hanging under lights. I find it difficult to get decent photos of it due to its length. It really does suit our high ceiling house so at this stage I am happy if it never finds its forever home but maybe one day it will. 

Inset 1 and Remnants

 I am thankful to be in a vibrant group of fellow textile artists called Tangled Threads here in the South Burnett. We are kept busy each year creating work for exhibitions in our area. Each year that I have been a member ( except for 2020) due to Sars-Cov-2 we have participated in the Winter Craft Festival in Kingaroy. We make new pieces each year for July then we exhibit at other places after that. In 2018 the theme was Inset and the challenge was to use metal in something. I had been trying out ideas for other focal points in my pieces other than the triangle peaks. I still wanted the shuttered view of a landscape. I came up with this, wanting bands of colour and an image within. This piece is called Inset 1- our Daily Landscape. I also wanted to frame within the focal point so I appliqued 1/4" wide copper foil ( used in guitars for sound reflection) that I sourced on ebay. This is definitely one of my family's favourite pieces. I actually discovered a photo of it ( from hanging in the Kingaroy Gallery) on Pinterest. Mind you they never acknowledged who made it, would have been good if they did.

In August each year, we set the theme and challenge for the next year. We came up with Remnants in 2018 for the 2019 year. For many years I have had fungi on a long list of possible things for inspiration. This piece came about because of the colours of fungi that I have seen on the decomposing wood in our paddocks. It looks a bit "drab" in this photo, but under the lights in a gallery and in our house it glows. I quilted the grey fabric with the colours of the strips and it is very effective. 

 I have been working on The Incubator and Mastermind Program with Lisa Call. This runs for 6 months as a project and I have been busy. Blogging, using Evernote to write about my art, using Excel for inventories is all part of the project. I have been managing to just keep up with it all. As well as doing extra shifts at my paid job, it has been a busy few weeks. On the plus side, I have been working on a couple of new pieces as well. On the home front, we are still waiting ( is getting very dry ) for some rain. Hope I have better news about that next week.