Every year SAQA calls for applications from art quilters who wish to work with a mentor to guide their development in some aspect of their art quilt practice towards a self identified goal, and a new mentoring year is just underway. For several years now, I’ve volunteered to mentor someone, because it’s one of the several ways that I can contribute to the organisation, and as a mentee progresses towards their goals it gives me satisfaction, too.

I haven’t always found it completely rewarding, though: my first mentee just faded off into the distance around June, without announcing to me, or SAQA, that she was quitting for any reason – suddenly there was just silence, which left me feeling a bit of a failure. The following year my allocated mentee asked for another mentor! which was actually quite a relief, as she was difficult and I think had unrealistic expectations about her committment. The next one, who was really doing very well, suddenly got totally snowed under by an avalanche of adult children’s needs, and though she said ‘I’ll get back to you when things calm down.’, for all I know she is still struggling with all that, because I never heard from her again. Perhaps she had to realign her priorities permanently.

In the past couple of years I’ve had very rewarding mentorships, with women who were articulate and understood their strong motivations; and each consistently worked on their goals during each of our times together. My new mentee and I do not yet know each other beyond the facts on her application form and whatever she read on my volunteer form, the details of which I now don’t remember exactly. I’m sure it will be an interesting year as she sounds articulate, realistic and motivated.

Although I am a former teacher, it is not a teaching position, it’s more one of directing the mentee where to look for the information or technical learning they identify they want/need, of responding with critique when asked, and sharing experience about things like writing artist statements, or some things to do in their studio practice that could help in some way.

Volunteer members contribute by sharing experience, support and advice to fellow members who’ve identified one or several areas of their art practice which they wish to develop, and I’ve found the most frequently expressed goal is wanting to find their own unique ‘voice’. This is more than just developing a particular ‘style’ though. An artist speaks through her work, and developing her own voice involves thinking about personal things, motivations and inspirations, and on developing understanding about whatever it is that the artist holds strong views about, or is deeply interested in. It’s a path of discovery which, once you’re on it, always suggests new steps to take, keeping you moving forward…. and this is a large part of why I write my blog. As my artist’s diary, my posts here record my thinking and that’s part of the documentation of my body of work.

I recently suggested to someone struggling with all this that perhaps it would be a good idea to start a new Word.doc for each new work. I suggested she write in it without any intent to publish anywhere, but to use it to give a frame of reference, a skeleton for more thought about where her work is heading, adding into it any thoughts about why she wants design this work, the technique options, emerging title ideas, lists of relevant words, phrases and possible quotes; research links to facts, a picture or two or work in progress; a sentence on what’s on her mind as she works. From now on this will be one of my key recommendations to anyone who asks for help finding their voice.

My current new work is yet another with a grid layout. I’ve said before that grids really appeal to me, and although I attribute that to enduring influence from my brief immersion in the world of traditional geometric patchwork, and could declare QED, I am currently thinking more deeply about ‘grids’ as in my previous post.

Browsing in Pinterest just now, I came across some really interesting surface design grids in varous media and pinned several. This one instantly reminded me of the wonderful heavily stitched cross hatched lines on layers of fabric by Irish textile artist Patricia Kelly, whose website I visited. Although I wasn’t surprised at all her wonderful portfolio, what stood out to me was that while I’ve been closely following her work there and on Instagram I’ve become very influenced by certain technical characteristics and begun to embrace them in my own, like irregularity of all kinds including hanging threads and rough, unfinished, and torn edges. These are not the sole preserve of Kelly’s work, of course, but seeing it all displayed together made me aware of how close I could get to ‘style copying’ without realising it. However, on reflection, I realised that such characteristics appear in the works of so many of the textile artists whose work I currently admire most, including Anita Romano, Shelley Rhodes, Cas Holmes, Dorothy Caldwell, Roberta Wagner, Rieko Koga and more. Without claiming equal celebrity status with such well known names, it is clear we and many others are part of a strong current trend in contemporary hand stitched art in which all kinds of lines, shapes and textures, frequently unruly or suggesting incompetence, are used to produce our artistic statements, unlike the pursuit of the highst standards of technical excellence most prized in the world of traditional embroideries.