There were about 20 artists on yesterday’s SAQA JAMs YAK zoom call, and we discussed a number of topics, including the pros and cons of larger and smaller sized works, and different views on presenting or displaying our fibre art, including the thorny old one of whether to mount and frame textile works, under glass or not. There are so many acceptable options these days, which can appeal or not, depending on what field you’re coming from, and where you’re showing your work is a factor, too.

In the context of this discussion, I mentioned a juried fibre art exhibition held in the late 90s, I think by WAFTA (West Australian Fibre Textile Artists) in Perth, Western Australia – at least I think they put it on. I will never forget one piece in that show I found quite astonishing to see it hung it using several grommets along the top edge which were looped over a few nails in the gallery wall. They were positioned so that it buckled a bit, deliberately not sitting flat against the wall. In addition the edges of the canvas were just cut and left raw, bereft of any kind of finishing off that I recall. Looking back it was a bit innovative, maybe ground breaking at the time, and although I can’t remember the surface design, I’m sure that it probably was entirely appropriate, as I now see I myself was more focused on technique rather than its message, because that was where my own art was.

In the late 90s I was 100% into freehand cut, machine pieced quilted works with bound or faced edges. With top quality workmanship all my threads were skillfully, neatly and carefully finished off as I diligently buried all knots between layers – they didn’t even show on the back of a work, and still don’t on any of my backs. After all, I learned taught good sewing and embroidery skills by my mother, grandmother and domestic science teachers at school; and as a teen I often successfully sewed myself outfits using the more demanding Vogue Designer patterns. In the late 80s my earliest contact with quilted textiles had been with the exacting requirements of traditional pieced geometric patchwork. Much of that changed when I met freehand or improvisational piecing. in an art quilt workshop by Nancy Crow – after which whatever I made was less precisely structured but still neatly finished off.

Considering some of my own recent work, and images in my Pinterest collection, an informal, unfinished look is something I have been working towards for some time…. and it isn’t always easy to carry out on purpose. But it does fit with me seeing any kind of Life as a continuum between start and finish points without any set length or pattern. A life can be long or short, and it can be a smooth continuum, but it is more likely to be untidy in places, occasionally punctuated by upheavals or mistakes at some points along the way. Fabric marked by stitches is a statement or an exploration of something on the artist’s mind, and, just like a life, a stitchery can have messy stops, starts and changes of directions, stitches or threads along the way.

My favourite artists whose medium is stitch include Roberta Wagner (“Much of my recent work has a feeling of age reminiscent of memories and buried treasure”), Shelley Rhodes , Rieko Koga (“She expresses her universe through threads and needles, working spontaneously.”) , Anitta Romano (“It is above all a question of inscribing time in matter, of transforming time into matter”) Carolyn Nelson (“…by hand, torn, layered, stitched, embedded…” To this list I’d add Cristina Llambi, the artist whose exhibition I recently loved. All of them stitch their ideas free of any sign of tradition or technical rules, and that freedom brings an air of spontaneity and sensitive response of the stitcher to his/her environment.

It’s no secret to my readers that I love hand stitching, and as I move along I do so rhythmically with a result that the marks tend to come out in a pretty regular way:

There are times when I have delighted in stitching a regular kind of pattern leaving out anything that disturbs it. I’ve written before on primal shapes – squares and triangles in particular, and how grid layouts represent systems of order, like societies, or a body of knowledge, or a record of the passage of time. A couple of my recent works have this theme –