At last, thumbs, full views and some detailsare in a newly added gallery on my website – at the top of the drop down gallery menu, The Creative Stitch: pre 1988 One example:
When I began my blog almost 5 years ago now, I had in mind something different from what it has morphed into. My blog
has become an important part of my life as a visual diary; and also that since it was integrated with the website a while back now (thanks
Gloria) it has enhanced it’s role as a running sidebar to my website as I’ve made regular additions to both, becoming more deeply linked
than when they were separate. Blogs mean different things to different people – just last week someone emailed me to say what I wrote
that day was all very well but if I added videos (colour and movement !) the post would have been more entertaining ! Well, she can
google around if she wants, but time is pressing and I know many of my readers are very busy and focused people, some with demanding creative lives of their own. If they’re anything like me they spend too much time in front of their screens and need to limit that ;-p This is the only kind of journally thing I keep – with the bonus that all of you can share it.
I periodically think about my earlier work – and how it might not have had such a definite sort of cut off point, 1987, if we had not been suddenly moved from Kalgoorlie WA to Denver CO within 3 months of my solo exhibition “Sunburnt Textures” , of which all the works pictured on the new gallery were part. What I have done is all part of a progression along a path – “my journey” – I hate how that expression is bandied about by people with creative and artistic pretensions, but there we are – I have used it, for just this once. You won’t read it from me again, in any of my statements. At this point I am assuming the reader will click the link to the gallery and leave this page for a minute to return and read on… And when I do look at this body of work, the comments of several people at the opening night still ring in my ears: one eminent craftsman in attendance said something like “..and YOU did ALL these works?” which I realised with hindsight later, you can take two ways – did he mean I hadn’t yet found my voice (another hackneyed phrase, sorry) perhaps, rather than as I heard it at the time, omg, this person is sooo talented and versatile !!! and (2) the second comment, from my thread supplier, “I’d love to see you work so much larger – big – really big…” While I am certain both of these people inflouenced me, I haven’t seen either of them again.
So looking back, I can say: Nearly 30 years ago I was absorbed with textures of the earth’s surface and representing these in stitch. Then came man-made markings and patterns (Ancient Expressions), different environments (Colour Memories) and processes of natural forces which caused the large shapes to appear, and now I am particularly interested in the activity on surfaces plus the lapse of time and possible decay(Timetracks). Where is this to take me I wonder…. Life has had ups and downs, just as seasons and processes do ( Ebb&Flow)
I’ll let you know if I get off this path and onto something totally different!
And if the spacing in this post has come out all funny – I don’t know what I have done backing and forthing with the editing, but that’s it for now – just be tolerant or a little entertained a little by it, I’m off to make some more samples. cheers….
Alison, I really like the textures in these pieces, and it is interesting to see how you have always been intrigued by geology and all its forms. Have you read “Angle of Repose” by Wallace Stegner? I think you’d love it – a story about a woman who leaves the East coast of the U.S. to marry a man who is a mining engineer, and their life together as they move from place to place for his work. It’s set in the late 1800’s if I remember correctly, and written beautifully.
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