listen to your body

Too much this past week.

This is me, curled up under
'protection
blanket'.

Feeling blessed

We had a wonderful Christmas here. It was busy and beautiful and unplugged. My very best holiday wishes to all my friends who read this blog.

New art histories

Finally getting the tree undressed, ten ornaments at a time.
Finally getting my art history work organized.

Traditional art history states that art is about universal human experience but Marxist art history says that this is just not true. Art is a weapon employed by the middle class in an ideological struggle for cultural dominance. The kind of education that art historians require is limited to members of a leisured and wealthy social class.

Other new ways of looking at art history are from a feminist viewpoint or from a non-western viewpoint. Art History is being re-written and it's very different from what it was thirty years ago.

Do you ever borrow from other cultures in your work?

Personal Language: Millennium Journal (stitched 2006)

I’ve felt so much power within the art from other cultures that I’ve wanted to have that same kind of power in my own work. I taught myself how to dye, paint and print fabrics like they do in Japan, Australia, or Africa, and how they do mirror and kantha embroidery in India and Pakistan. I was looking for a way to have my own work enter the intuitive and abstract.

I admit that I felt that these ways of working were available to me to use in my art just as much as the western realist tradition was available to me. From the very beginning of my quilt making I realised that all those triangles and squares and circles have been around the world FOREVER as a language. They were not used as much in the ‘civilised’ world of Greek/Renaissance tradition. Those repeated geometric shapes are the basis of traditional quilt pattern. I was able to understand my own tradition of north American quilt design better by learning the variety of meanings the shapes had in other cultures. I’ve used these first shapes like a code.

It’s that secret language that I love about primitive art. However, I see now that in a modernist sense, what I was doing was using the ‘other’ way of seeing the world. I still want to continue to borrow repeated arrangements of first shapes and shiny surfaces because I believe it to be a multicultural language that can be understood by all of us in the world. Aren’t we are all ethnic?

What does avant-garde mean?

Cutting edge?
In front of the rest?
Does 'avant-garde’ only refer to ‘modern’ art, developed in Paris early in the 20th century?

portfolio of samples

Candle wicking and metal on wool. Pins and linen on wool. Sheet aluminum and copper machine stitched to linen Eyelet stitch and hand quilting on hand dyed rayon.

Elizabeth I

Elizabeth I’s court was so fine that in 1595 a German visitor remarked that “at no other court have I ever seen so much splendour and such fine clothes.” Velvet, furs, jewels of all sorts, gold braid, silk fabric, and fine linen under clothing were used for both men and women's elaborately constructed garments.

Materials used for this collage: Vogue April 2007 magazine pages

Protection Blanket

This quilt is the one that we are presently hanging in our home. The central diamond is embellished with sequins.

Light – reflecting materials such as mirrors, beads, sequins, and white shells are associated with protection as they are thought to have the ability to ward off evil and thereby preserve fertility in many cultures world wide.

Protection Blanket is number 42 on my list of one hundred quilts.

working small

This silk floss sample is only about 5 inches square. (ten hours)

I remain completely me

Shining surfaces express concepts of fertiltiy and survival.

Protection Blanket

'Diamond in a Square' is a very serene traditional Amish design. A long held interest in symbols led me to discover that textiles embellished with metallic threads, shiny mirrors or sequins are associated with protection because they are thought to ward off evil. Although the plain, non - violent Amish people would not have added any ornament I added shiny sequins to the austere shield that forms the centre diamond.
All humanity and the earth need extra protection at this time.