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Greetings to you all and the best of Cheer. I've promised (editor) Barbara an article so long ago she may well have forgotten, and this, coupled with my sense of having lost touch with many of you whose association I've enjoyed, has prompted me to write. I hope you are all enjoying the success of your plans and that much goodwill travels with you.
The past few years for me have been most eventful in a somewhat whirlwind way - I seem to have had more time outside my studio than working in it since compiling an exhibition of work in 1994.
Some of you will recall this exhibition, called "Virtue or Obsession" held at the Jam Factory Craft and Design Centre in Adelaide. It was included in the program of events celebrating 100 years of women's suffrage in South Australia and showed my work alongside my mother's, my grandmother's and great grandmother's as representing 100 matrilineal years of textile pursuit. This proved to be an important personal/family exhibition and I saw much appreciation in the eyes of visitors who recognised the special flow of influence from one woman to another through mother/daughter/grand-daughter relationships.
The following year I was challenged, as were many of us, to make a quilt for the The (NSW) Quilters' Guild's exhibition to Nagoya - "Australia Dreaming". You may recall the strong circular motif of "Out of Gondwana" which was my way of imagining a sense of deep spiritual belonging which goes deeper than physical boundaries.
While "Australia Dreaming" was on show in Japan, I was making my own preparations to go there. My husband, Chester, who is a potter, had been invited to exhibit and work in Japan for the three months of December '95 to February '96. (We married one week before flying to Nagoya, which explains the -Nealie which now tacks onto my Irvine).
This visit was to culminate with a joint exhibition of Australian and Japanese artists at Meitetsu department store in Nagoya. "Out of Gondwana" was the centrepiece of my group of work and included a number of small quilts more suitable to Japanese circumstances. We of the wide, brown land feel the limit on space the Japanese live with and yet this encouraged me to use a more intimate scale for my work which I have thoroughly enjoyed.
During my stay in Japan, I was able to visit a number of textile establishments among the many pottery destinations. I was also given an opportunity to exhibit a number of small works in a gallery in Seki, Gifu Prefecture as well as our large exhibition in Nagoya.
Generally, I found the Japanese public responded well to the sense of patient stitching in my work and the poetic/philosophic tone of the imagery. Here in Japan was an audience which readily understood, through their own cultural forms, the sense of nature as a reflection of the human condition and this has always underpinned my use of landscape imagery. I came away with very few pieces of work remaining.
I returned home to an exciting commission proposed locally by the Mudgee Wine Grape Growers Association. They were interested in a huge quilt as backdrop for their trade display at Darling Harbour and had commissioned two other local artists to furnish the remainder of the display. Such vision! So picture it: while the marathon runners were enduring for olympic status in Atlanta, I was enduring my own marathon of making a 4.5m x 1.5m (180" x 60") quilt in three sections in record breaking time. "Mudgee Valley", as it's called, represents Mudgee district in many promotions now and is standing up to its nomadic life very well.
Later that same year, from October to December, I worked as an artist-in-residence at the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery in Launceston, Tasmania. Here curator Glenda King provided me with a magical cottage to live in, perched on the edge of Cataract Gorge. It was only a short walk past the Museum to the restored Georgian warehouse where the entire centre floor was given over as my studio and exhibition space. Here I spent time with school groups and others who visited me, and gave several workshops both in Hobart and Launceston on airbrushing and stitching in my style. The LPQ (Launceston Patchwork and Quilters) endured eight weeks of Thursday afternoon tuition!
I was also able to acquaint myself with the drama and beauty of Tasmania's natural reaches. During this time I compiled drawings and an extensive photo-essay of striking images which stayed with me as the basis of my anticipated exhibition with the Museum in 1999. Having come to a rough estimate of the number of stitches needed to fill the huge gallery I'm offered, you can understand that this is my current program of work, albeit with too many interruptions!
I finished a piece "Not Angry - Explosive" for the Quilters' Guild of South Australia's exhibition "Dare to Differ - Over the Top". I brushed this piece during my residency in Launceston, in fact. Just now I'm completing a quilt to show in Tokyo with the 5th Quilt Nihon's invited exhibition, and will be contributing quilts to an exhibition of Australian Textiles which curator Glenda King and Craft Australia are sending to Lodz, Poland in 1998 during the International Triennial of Tapestry there. I am proud to be one of those representing quilting within a strong group of Australian textile artists and in such an exhibition as this event, now reputed to be the premier textile showcase in Europe. It is a reflection of how far our quilting endeavours are reaching!
Between quilts Chester and I are building a new home/studio in the country at Gulgong NSW. Hefting and hammering has developed a muscle structure to make the effort of stitching numerous quilts seem like child's play. Our gallery here in town is now closed and we expect to have open weekends from time to time at our new property only 10km out. I continue to produce small and miniature work and will be exhibiting these with Chester and Susie McMeekin's pottery at Oz Artspace in the Blue Mountains.
We take up our new residence before Christmas. Happy times to you all, and may the New Year see all your dreams and struggles come through.
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