In Plain View # 9

At the moment, this scene is common all over the Cecil Plains, where I live. Autumn is here and grass is turning brown and gold.  The trees remain the same colour all year round - a sort of browny green.  There are bright green remnants of crops in the paddocks, but winter is almost here and mornings are nippy. Soon there will be frosts.

Kashmir Memories

This item is number 29 in the exhibition and the green background is made from a pharen, which is a sort of coat worn by men and women in Kashmir. If the wool is thin, they include a woollen lining and everyone carries a charcoal burning fire-pot underneath in the winter, so everyone looks pregnant.
I used Amish colours in the centre and the whole thing glows under light. As there is only one layer, it would probably have been wise to mount it on a thin board.
The stitching is like the reflections on the calm lakes where the houseboats wait for tourists.

Homeward Thoughts

This is number 33 in the exhibition and is a very recent work. It is part of a series of 12 pieces representing each of the verses in the poem "My Country" by Dorothea Mackellar.  This poem is very popular in Australia and was once taught to every school child. I belong to a group called The Darling Downs Textile Art Group, so we all took a verse and made an identically sized piece which was then exhibited in a local gallery at Gatton in the Lockyer Valley.  This is only the second time it has been exhibited.

The calico background of my interpretation was rust and iron dyed in the garden and I let the resulting patterns dictate the content. The reflection in the water was surprising and I only found it when the piece was photographed. The ghostly trees were made from recycled wool, invisibly stitched in place so that they would appear insubstantial. The last  verse of the whole poem reads:

Though earth holds many splendours,

Wherever I may die,

I know to what brown country

My homing thoughts will fly.

What Have We Done?

This is number 25 in the exhibition. It is made from recycled wool and stitched all over with hand-dyed wool of various thickness. It is what Australia might look like when global warming destroys the climate. This is already a hot, dry continent and it seems to be getting worse.  Certainly last summer had more hot days than I remember before. Burnt-out stripped car wrecks are a feature of rural Australia, so it seemed a fitting icon of the future.

This is number 14 in the exhibition and I have re-named it since I made it. Near my house, there was a horse stud and stable complex where racehorses were trained. It was  huge establishment with homes for the workers and a full size track for training and lots of stable blocks and so on. It was always green, even during a drought and it was also a productive farm, growing food for the horses and running some cattle.
Most of it has now disappeared under a new, very large airport.  Only the name remains, so I called this Wellcamp Downs. in memory of the complex.

It is made from recycled wool, hand-dyed. I used the edge of the blanket for the track sections and my sister gave me some old weaving wool which I used for the trees and bushes.  I used lots of different size stitches to commemorate all the horses which passed through the place. In a short while, horses will be replaced by people coming and going, as this new Wellcamp airport is also going to be a busy, thriving place.

Hyacinth

This is a fairly traditional quilt made in the late 1990's.

The background was pieced first and then quilted while the flower parts were made separately and then attached by hand.

The flower head is heavily padded underneath the petals, which were made individually and stitched on. Some have machine details and some have oil pastel details. Size: H: 140cm x W: 133cm

Here Be Dragons.
Re-cycled wool blanket, hand dyed and then dye painted.
This quilt was chosen as the invitation to my first solo exhibition which opens on June 1st at the Oakey Cultural Centre in Oakey, Queensland, Australia.

This is the first blog I have done since 2007 and it took a lot of catching up. I will, Google willing, be posting more pictures of these works very soon.  Marion