I think we’re all interested in our physical surroundings. We understand views of it, and we know it varies from useful and friendly (to Man) to hostile or barren as in deserts or rugged mountains. I studied geography, including geomorphology which fascinated me. As it turned out I married an exploration geologist, so all my adult life have continued to be aware of what we see of the Earth’s surface and how it relates to human activity. Landscape is not static, no matter how unchanging the large elements of it appear to be. We might look out the window at a mountain peak every day of our lives and we will think it has never changed from when we first became aware of it. But even a huge solid mountain does change, constantly, but we don’t register this unless a volcano erupts, or there’s a large landslide, for example. A rough storm over a few days will quickly and dramatically change the shape and profile of a beach. A hill gradually wears down with water, temperature changes or wind action, dislodging rocks and sandy materials that gradually accumulate somewhere else closer to the coastline. Silt deposits on a valley floor, fills in a bay on a coastline or adds to a river delta; and material roaring down a canyon in a flash flood will spread out onto the plains below to form an arroyo as the water sinks into the sandy plain. Take this favourite photo of mine as an example:

It may take you a few minutes, though, to work out that this is actually only a line of tiny sand ‘cliffs’ just a few cms high on a local beach. In the lower part of the pic the lines that clearly have something to do with the water moving down on to the lower level are actually trails left by tiny little bivalves as they retreat closer to the water’s edge with the receding tide.

The main lines could be the plan some freehand patchwork, and with this in mind I did a quick sample for a class in Gramado last year to demonstrate the potential that interesting landscape photos have.

Although I won’t take this particular sample further, a year+ on, it does bear further thinking about.

Perhaps it could work well as a design using oversewn fabric, or even leather patches and strips … neither approach I’d have dreamed of a year ago.