The Gypsies of Bagra
In March 2023 I went with Marigold Tours on a 10 day adventure in textiles to Rajastan, India. We went to Bagra to experience dabu (mud resist) dying and there we met the gypsies. The parents worked in the dye baths and fields, laying out the long lengths of printed cloth to dry in the sun and the children, dressed in vivid colours ran about us as we wandered among the lengths of fabric. The older children shepherded the younger ones.
These people are itinerants and live in makeshift camps of bamboo covered with old quilts. I have tried to capture the camp in the background placing it under net to push it back in emphasis. The children were so happy and resilient, polite and delighted when we gave them toiletries.
This thread painting is a composite layout from several photographs I took and was quite a challenge in getting tonal facial features to show sunlight and shadow.
At The Water’s Edge
This small piece was part of an exhibition organised by Bernina. It uses surface decoration, laminated teabags, thread painting and textured yarns. The inspiration for this piece came from my grandchildren who loved to sit at the edge of the sea creating sand spires by forming wet sand through their fingers and slowly building up tall stalagmite structures.
Graeme
The shadows on this portrait were quite challenge.
Graeme was a farmer Rob and I met when we took the camper van on an inaugural tour of the South Island and were close to Springfield, headed to cross the Alps over Arthur’s Pass. I was busy photographing the landscape when he came along in his landrover and we started talking. The upshot was that he and Rob went off to his club for the early evening and I extracted permission from him to use the photo I took of him in my art work
Babies in the Garden
Apart from the background and the nest this little piece is all thread painted directly onto the substrate backing. We have a large garden and each year there is an abundance of nesting going on. For several years the same blackbird nested and raised her family behind the Virginia Creeper on the side of the dining room so it is always a joy to be able to peer in and see the changing stages. Mumma bird didn’t mind me at all but poppa bird was much more cagey and would sit, with his beak full of worms, in the tree outside the dining room and then, when he thought he was unobserved, dive in to feed those hungry mouths. Because there was a window just above the nest it was quite easy to look in and see the development and how, when the parent birds were away, the nestlings sat quiet and still at the bottom of the nest. Any semblance of disturbance and hungry mouth appeared expecting it to be parent birds with food.
The thrush was an interesting experiment as I used variegated thread and had to manipulate the colour changes to get the speckles on the breast.
The nest has been made from some fibrous florist shop find. Until I did the Gypsies from Bagra this was the largest thread painting I had attempted.
Through the Lens of Steve McCurry
As my interest in thread painting older faces developed, I found some wonderful portraits photographed by Steve McCurry who was a freelance photographer for National Geographic. I wrote to his studio and was granted permission to use his photographs as a starting point as long as I referenced Steve in my work. At the same time my interest in using teabags as a substrate within my work was developing and it seemed a good match to place the images in a teabag substrate stamped with a camera and having the images surrounding an image of Steve with his camera. All the teabags were salvaged from use dried and attached to a background of cotton with the teabags being attached with gel medium and a layer of gel medium over the top. The background took on an aged leather look. I called this quilt “Through the lens of Steve McCurry. Below is a close up of the individual images including some that were not used in the finished quilt.
Over the years I have learnt a lot from Steve’s photographs both in composition and of creating the ordinary/mundane into photographic work of art.
Shadow
Getting depth in a pet portrait of a cat that is all black was a challenge. I needed to introduce brown and grey in order for this thread painting not to be completely flat.
Shadow was my grandson’s cat and when he had his bad football injury and was laid up while I cared for him and home schooled him, Shadow was never far from his side. he would curl up on the black throw and nearly scare me to death when I went to move the throw, not knowing he was there. He would shoot up in the air and run up the back of the couch. He was a very lovely cat and worthy to be immortalised in this thread painting.
There’s a Storm Coming
This was a small quilt, a mix of thread painting and landscape applique. The sky was achieved by using a navy blue fabric that was bleach treated with a paper towel and then rinsed in sodium chloride to achieve the effect of storm clouds. The waves are also an early attempt at creating white water through thread painting and taking account of the way the waves curl from the bottom to the top of the pieces.
A Gathering of Keruru
Learning to thread paint really changed my focus for quite a while. This quilt was begun in a workshop - the keruru (native wood pigeon) sitting on a wool felt log at the bottom left was made in this workshop. The keruru were made individually and then appliqued on. My quilt took on a life of its own and morphed from the class ‘sample” into this quilt. The flowers on the stylized cabbage tree are strings of pearl beads stitched onto strips of white fabric and applied. I can remember at the time of making this looking out for cabbage trees that were coming into flower to get the form of the flower branches sort of correct. The clematis flowers at the top right are also thread painted with the lianas made from textured yarn.
I remember I learnt a lot of other of textile techniques in this workshop. It was the fisrt time I had used raw edge applique - leaves of the cabbage tree and the process of creating the wool log was interesting. Wool sliver dyed in various colours was laid out on a background fabric and covered with water soluble laundry bags. This was then stitched over both horizontally and virtically. Once the water soluble bags were washed away, I was left with a substrate that was very like moss covered logs. Without the water soluble the wool felt would have caught in the presser foot of the machine and been almost impossible to stitch. It is a technique i will use again when I begin my series on tree bark textures
The quilt is free machine quilted. It marks a move in my journey from this sort of technique and into free style design
The Ox Team
Texture has always been a feature in my art work and this one is no exception. The trees and bush surrounding the image are made from wool needle felt and textured yarn
This was a family piece that was a bit scary to contemplate. My great grandfather and his three sons farmed in the Oparau area and had to clear some land that was covered in trees to get timber for building on the farm - we are talking around the 1930s here. They worked with old fashioned axes and used a bullock team to drag the trees out of the bush to where they could be milled for building. As long as I can remember a photo of the four of them with the bullock team has hung somewhere in the house. With the magic of digital reproduction I now have my own copy of the original photo which hangs in the dining room. It is a bit of a daunting operation to replicate that photo but it was a heritage task.
The men are predominantly thread sketched, the bullocks have more detail added with thread paint. This is a very early thread paint and is quite painterly in its effect. The background is machine quilted
Memories of Kakadu
My youngest daughter Kim spent 8 years in Darwin and when I went to visit we would often take a road trip to Kakadu National Park. It was full of wildlife and this quilt is dedicated to those trips. The images are thread painted and then applied to a pieced background of neutral fabrics. The quilt is edged with a textured yarn and the machine quilting includes images of gum leaves. The text in the middle is from a poem I wrote about another visit to Australia, the William Ricketts Sanctuary near Melbourne