Looking back now, it seems my whole adult life has been destined to mostly be spent on flat plains, as I have just realised my personal landscape vision would be very different if I had remained, in my birth place, Tasmania, that mountainous island state of Australia which I left in my early 20s to live in Western Australia and points beyond. However much I have thought about what inspires my art making and how my past has influenced the present (and presumably will do in the future) it surprises me that I have only just realised this fact!!

I’ve moved about a great deal, as my exploration geologist husband’s career involved searching for base metals on 3 continents. The Nickel Boom of the 60’s-70s took us to Western Australia, and, for a few years he was in the search for uranium in The Northern Territory and Far NW Queensland. Gold took us back to Western Australia again, and from there he was transferred to Denver CO, for a few years. He was involved in a successful entrepreneurial search for gold and other metals here in South America for about 20 years until retirement. For the first two decades of his career we lived and travelled across the vast regions of Australia’s Outback, with the characteristically flat, very low profile grassy plains occasionally sporting eroded outcrops of ancient landforms.

The north of the Australian continent is known as The Top End, and subject to monsoon seasons from late November until May. Normally dry river beds fill and start flowing over flood plains as the water makes its way to the coast or low lying central areas that become shallow inland seas briefly before they disappear into the aquifer or evaporate. Besides coming alive with animals, birds and plants, during that season often some areas will become impassable, sometimes for weeks, except where all-weather roads have been constructed. Even as I write, this process is proceeding across the land on a grand scale following excellent rains in the first 3 months of this year, meaning this will be a bumper year for wildflowers, tourism and beef production.

In May, The Dry develops again and prevails until November, by which time vast areas of the essentially flat continent have produced a lot of grass which eventually dies back to leave almost bare the characteristic red soils that are typical of our Outback. But people can once again move around for business and tourism, pastoralists can move their animals around and muster them, and mining companies engage in mineral exploration programs of surveying and mapping, soil sampling and drilling.

In total, I’ve lived about 20 years in the Outback – Western Australia, Far NW Queensland and The Northern Territory – around heavily eroded, round-topped rock outcrops rising out of vast low-profiled plains. Australia is the most ancient, most stable, flattest section of the Earth’s crust. Here I should add that from the late 80’s we spent 6 years in Denver CO, the westernmost suburbs of which are at the very start of the foothills of The Rocky Mountains. Heading East from Denver, it’s a couple of days’ drive on I-70 across the Central Plains states of Kansas and Missouri to the city of St. Louis on the Mississippi River. For mile after mile, there’s nothing of note., just flat cornfields, grain silos and some railroad towns – been there, driven that.

In the late 90s, Gold exploration brought the geologist+1 to Uruguay, a very small, flat country situated in another flat grassy plains region known as the Pampa, This Pampa covers much of S. Brasil, E. Argentina and contains all of Uruguay. A few mesa structures rise out of these plains, too, in the north and east, and the highest point in the whole country is only about 520m.

Exploration geos must move to where the rocks are, and after so many years near heavily weathered, ancient rocks rising out of flat plains, it’s hardly surprising that I see ‘landscape’ in very basic primal shapes of wandering lines and arc shapes representing rounded top hills. If I lived somewhere with active volcanoes or recently dormant ones, I’d probably be more inclined to visualise hills as triangles.

Following are some of my landscape quilts made during the last twenty years. They certainly form a series based on my vision of landscape, which, as I outlined at the start of this post, has been entirely developed over extended periods living on flat plains with occasional rounded rocky outcrops, that is, very ancient weathered surfaces 🙂

My techniques are always very simple and involve any or all of hand applique, machine piecing and reverse machine applique. In recent years I have used hand stitched marks in my surface designs and quilting, where they currently predominate, and I haven’t done any piecing for several years. Except for the first one, Abstract Landscape Textures, all the above were machine quilted. Many Australian Aboriginal artists in particular outline major shapes with lines of dots, and paint filler patterns within those shapes in that distinct style known as ‘Aboriginal dot painting’. It’s something akin to Pointillism, although the coloured dots tend to be more homogenous rather than several colours mixed for the colour blending that characterises the Post Impressionist work of the pointillists like Georges Seurat and Paul Signac. Outlining something in a line of dots by hand, or for example with French Knots, is demanding of time and patience. While I never say “never”, in this case I’m pretty sure I will never fill in shapes with dots or knots… although now I think of it, a filler of French Knots is tempting…

My regular readers know my familiarity with basic landforms and structures, and my questions are easily answered by the in-house geologist here 🙂

I showed in recent a post how this work was inspired by rock strata, and showing how I’m representing the lines, shapes and colour of a formation featuring a normal fault using the particular techniques I’m favouring at present. It’s nearly finished and pretty much only the edge treatment needs to be done once I decide which technique to use for it. Options are a very fine binding in black or a facing.

Pieced fabric strips chosen for their earthy colours were fused to the black fabric, and linear patterns of stitching added to convey the impression of a layered, sedimentary rock formation split by earth forces into sections that over time were forced to gradually move along the faultline in opposite directions – standard textbook stuff, and in that post are links to images of some striking actual examples.

‘Strata’ seems a fairly popular starting point for fibre art design, and looking around I came across a website for an artist Caroline Burton with art inspired by geology , and of course, to anyone who works with fabric strips, those images of layered rock sturctures are bound to suggest using fabric strips in some way. I myself made a smallish piece with that title twenty years ago:

Checking some of my pins on Pinterest today, I was a bit startled to find an image I recently pinned of some cliffs along the UK coast that looks incredibly like the piece I’m working on right now. In fact I hadn’t seen the photo until the work was well under way, but I find it interesting to realise exactly why it was so appealing to me. Obviously that includes the lines and shapes, but equally important are the colours, which I carefully chose for their earthy quality, thinking particularly of some emblematic Australian Outback landscapes that I’ve lived and travelled in that are forever burned on my consciousness. But of course rocks anywhere can be in those colours – they’re not uniquely Australian. If you’re interested to see how uncanny this likness is, do go to the photographer’s website https://www.robertharding.com/preview/847-179/sandstone-rock-strata-waterfalls-sandymouth-beach-sunset-near/ Although I admire Robert ‘s beautiful photos, and I’d love to put that one up here for comparison, it would cost me over US$30 to do that, and my pocket just isn’t that deep! You could purchase a print from him but even better would be to purchase my unique wall quilt, which I’m very close to finishing, with just another hour or so of quilting, and as I said, just finish off the edge. Easier said than done sometimes, as either method requires care.