Kookaburra Feathers

Kookaburra feathers
We have a resident pair of kookaburras, the largest of the kingfisher family. They have been here since we started living here nearly 8 years ago, and they delight us with their laughter and antics. One of them has gotten very brave and comes very close, and when Collin is digging in the garden he is to be found close by waiting for those tasty morsels of worms or grubs . We have established a very small home use vineyard and a favourite perch is the end posts of the vine trellises. We occasionally get lucky and they drop a feather. These are the feathers we have found over the years, and I have kept them, thinking that one day I will make a quilt inspired by them. Sometimes when I get phone calls people ask me what the noise in the background is- and it is usually the kookaburras or magpies or parrots. Apparently the laughter of the kookaburras was used for the jungle sounds in the early Tarzan movies!

Saturday Morning

small work this morning

This is a small piece I made this morning, to keep sewing. It is made with organza which is why it has that odd sheen and has been burnt and quilted. Burning or melting with a soldering iron gives nice irregular edges to the shapes you melt back. I did this through two layers of polyester organza so that it did not melt back evenly. More rain today!

In My Garden This Morning

In My Garden This Morning

Kids are home from school today so don't hold out much hope for sewing. Last night it poured with rain, and it does not feel like summer will start in about 4 weeks. I found a Willy Wagtail nest this morning , with both parents ferociously guarding it- they are such neat constructions! And the bottle brush have started flowering: we have red ones, yellow ones as in the picture, and green ones. Some of the artichokes are ready to eat and the one above will be my lunch I think! The Japanese maple has really enjoyed all the rain this year and seems ot have doubled in size.

Things That Keep Me Going

Small Silk Works

Like everyone I seem to hit periods where all ideas seem to dry up, and I can't even look at my sewing machine. This is the time when I go and do some dyeing outside to try and make things happen again. Colour cheers me up immeasurably, and it is one of the reasons I am not attracted to discharging, or the fading and bleaching of aging. These were small works I made in silk last year when I hit such a period. Both are hand stitched and you can see the stitching if you click on the images. The first one is called wadi- and the silk has been tie dyed and the river/wadi has been dyed and hand printed. The second piece , has also been tie dyed with threads couched on.

Chassy- An Unforgettable Experience

Journal Quilt Chassy Tower

In the year 2000 I did a studio residency at Chateau de Chassy, the residence of Frederique Tison. She kindly allowed me to work there and to take my family ( husband and three children for a 3 month period). I took an Exhibition of Australian quilts called Australian Bounty. Both experiences have been the start of a roller coast journey, which has had moments of wonder. Last European summer I went by Chassy to see Frederique and she was photographing friendship pieces , which had also been exhibited in 2000 for a book she is preparing of the friendship project( which drew many entries from around the world). She also photographed the quilts I had with me, and this Landscape quilt was one of them. Last year I created journal quilts for the Houston journal quilts project, and I focused the nine pieces I made on the experience of Chassy. The above quilt is actually the opposite tower to the one pictured with my quilt. The middle window was our kitchen window. Hard to believe as I sit in our weatherboard in Southern Victoria, that this has been a part of my life. I intend to work more with some of the ideas that I worked with in the journal project, once I have more time.

Landscape in front of Chassy Tower 

Picassiete- The Wonderful Creation of Raymond Isidore

We first encountered Picassiette in the summer of 2000 when I did a residency at Chateau de Chassy in France. We were visiting Chartres and of course intended to visit the Cathedral , but then an acquaintance told us to also visit Picassiette. She suggested we go see the Cathedral first and then Picassiette, which we did and we were delighted by this little visited treasure. Raymond Isidore was a grave digger in Chartres and his little house stands in the same road as the cemetery where he worked. He commenced his creation with the shards of china and pottery he found as he dug in the graveyard, and this eventually became his obsession. He lived in a small small house with his wife and her three sons. He decorated the entire outside of the house with the shards he found and created an entrancing potage of mosaic. He covered every surface including pots and sills, as the photos show, and then moved onto the inside of his house where he also covered every surface. As time went on he bought extra land to create small votive grottoes also covered in mosaic for he was also a deeply religious man and many of his mosaics recreated images of the Cathedral.Of course he became the butt of jokes and hence the name Picassiette, however after his death in 1964 the little house has been maintained as a museum. I went back earlier this year with a friend and her son and my littlest daughter Ynez- and we had a delightful hour or so being enchanted by Raymond Isidore's whimsical imagination.

Picassiette, Chartres,France

More Lace

I am over yesterday and gearing up for a kids halloween party tonight. I think I will be the wicked witch of Gellibrand.
Spent more time exploring lace yesterday. I have posted photos of my great aunts and uncles on my fathers side of the family ( oh and if you click on the photo a larger version comes up) and they like my great grandmother are dressed in the costume of the islands of southern Holland known as Zeeland. Their mutsen are rather more austere and this is likely to be due to the fact that they lived in a fairly tight hugeunot community in Walcheren. I like the fact that the men wore ornament as much as the women and I remember my grandfather had pierced ears because the men also wore ear rings. The young woman in the bottom right has a long lace cap- this indicates that she was unmarried. The mutsen told much of a woman's standing and place in the community and were a type of code in a sense. The drochel lace is from the eighteenth century which I purchased in Brugge ( the Venice of the North). I bought this lace ,as it was likely to have been worn by the women in my families- this particular piece was all I could afford but it is quite fine linen which is of course why Belgium was the centre of much lace making- the water in the rivers was conducive to the right sort of fermentation of the flax to produce fine linen.

great aunts and uncles 

Drochel lace from teh 18th century 

In my Garden This Morning

Yesterday was such a disheartening day that I walked around my garden this morning and tried to kick start or revive some spark of creativity. I hate the jousts with bureaucracy that bring me home deflated with the knowledge that we are too poor. And then I look around my garden and see the wonder of the weird and wonderful shapes of the native flowers in my garden. We planted a corridor for birds and planted many natives, and my favourites- banksias. The knobby seed pods are a constant source of facination and have inspired many artists and writers alike. There are children's books dealing with banksia men that focus on their monster like protrusions and their hairy pods. There are people who have made "elf"people into the hollows of the pods. I love the change of colour from the darkness of the interior of each individual seed pod to the lighter rings of the lips of the pod. Many banksias will only seed after fire, or as in this case where the seed pods do open the seeds will only germinate after fire. The seed pods and the banksia flower are on the tree at the same time. I love the delicacy of this particular flower as the stamens seemed topped by delicate pearls. And the waratah- is just big wah me- so in your face so wonderful.

Waratah 

The banksia flower 

Banksia 

My great grandmother in costume
I am in my last year of finishing a masters in visual and performing art at Charles Sturt University.I started with the idea that I would be making quilts exploring the experience of immigration and I struggled to conceptualise this idea. I did write a small book dealing with what I remembered of the experience as a 9 1/2 year old child- but how do you translate that? But as I started to look further, and after reading a book by Eva Hoffman entitled Lost in Translation- Life in Another Language , the issue that became important was the 'difference' of being Australian and Dutch and what did it bring to the melange? It started me on a totally different tack. I started looking at photos of my family- I studied the photos to try and discover something that I could visually explore. The costume that my great grandmother is wearing is interesting of itself but it was ultimately the lace that spoke ot me, that gave me an avenue for exploration. The lace says so much of the life of this person, so I am wanting to make lace that carries that kind of communication- I hope.

What's in a Stitch?

A few days ago in talking about the "rough" stitching of the griots coat I talked about the mark making qualities of the stitch. June Underwood suggested I should take some now and later photos , which I have done. The first image is done with quite coarse knitting thread that I bought in a Dutch market and hand dyed. I like the effect of the coarseness of the thread and the uneveness of the dyeing also lends to the sense of texture. The second photo is a detail of a piece inspired by kantha embroidery. Kantha embroidery is practised by women in the bay of Bengal area and is largely used to patch together saris and dense stitching in order to strenghten the fabric thus created. They tend to use only running stitch and I love the narrative touch of the stitching by the women.I want to work on ways to make my stitching more expressive, more like communications from my inner self instead of the neat rows that I seem to be now producing.

Inspired by Kantha 

Detail stitching 

A Perfect Day in Venice