I’m still working on how I’m going to use the idea of little landscapes. Of the two samples above,

• on the left is an older one that I removed from it’s mounting, so could I say it has been ‘deframed’? (as in defrocked) though I like the colours, it is pieced and the seams make it ‘lumpy’ when pressed and bonded down onto its backing fabric. It was free machine appliqued to the cream fabric.
• on the right is one I just made a couple of days ago. The fabric sections were cut so they exactly fit edge to edge (improv way of cutting) and bonded into place without any seaming. All a bit fiddly I found. It was then machine appliqued with a luminescent red thread signifying a landscape hit by fires, but a bit underwhelming, lacking drama. Even so, a whole group of them would have a richer effect, but do I want to make a bunch more this way? A bit ho hum.

In around 2000, I made a bunch of these little landscapes for a textile exhibition. They are all different sizes but roughly ‘postcard’ sized, and with me being in love with woven rolled newspaper at the time, that’s what I used to construct these mounts for them (varnished). A number sold, but these were left, and sometime a few years ago, in a bit of a rush I ripped them off their mounts (tossed the mounts) and brought them back to Montevideo … with no particular aim in mind. I still don’t have a plan for them, but they’re better without the mounts!

• The strong blue skies and earthy colours are definitely Outback Australian, but belong to a much happier time for Australia than March 2020. Bushfires of course have always been and always will be part of the weather related life cycle of our continent. Only occasionally has such an extensive severe drought co-incided with specific regional strong weather pattterns to exacerbate and prolong the devastating 2019-20 fire season Australia’s just had.
• In the last few months, many of the more densely populated parts of the continent and big areas of forests were devastated by fire, leaving blackened trees, blackened heaps of rubble and roofing iron, miles and miles of wire fences without fenceposts, and of course, burned and blackened everything else too unspeakable to put into words. But I hope I can put some of that unspeakable into fabric and stitch, which is what I’m working on right now.

And just for fun, these are two of a group I made for the same textile exhibition. I’ve spent a lot of time driving in the Outback over the 20 years we lived out in some of the most remote places around Australia. We’ve seen a lot of our own country, courtesy of several mining companies who sent Mike out there to explore for minerals 🙂