THE QUILTMAKER AS ARTIST

© Sarah Tucker

Ozquilt Network Newsletter #39 March 2001

I am standing in front of one of Judy Hooworth's quilts on her studio wall. It is a work in progress. Predominantly yellow, it is formed from torn and layered stripes sewn horizontally; the technique that I had first seen used by Hooworth in the 'Mother and Daughter' Series. She tells me that her quilts "are all about memory", and in that instant I understand: here before me is a highly visual representation of the processes of memory layered, stratified and fixed in time.

Later, while listening to the recordings that I made of our conversation, two questions come to mind - firstly, how to reconcile the roles of quiltmaker and artist and, secondly, at what point does a quilt become a work of art? That Hooworth is an exemplary quiltmaker is not in question, her CV attests to her significant achievements as quiltmaker, teacher and writer; both in Australia and overseas (since our meeting I hear that Hooworth will have a solo show at the Manly Art Gallery in May and has had a quilt, 'Life Force', accepted for 'Quilt National 2001'; need I say more?).

I met with Hooworth in the kitchen of her home in Terrey Hills. Surrounded by examples of her quiltmaking, we talked over cups of coffee. This was the first time I had met Hooworth in person but I knew of her work from books, magazines and various exhibitions. I was already aware of how her quiltmaking had changed over the years and was particularly interested in the way her work appeared to sit in the two camps, that of the traditional quiltmaker and that of quilt artist. We sat beside just such a quilt hanging on the wall next to the kitchen table, 'Double Homage #2', a centre diamond quilt in the Lancaster County Amish style, composed in Hooworth's inimitable colours but evocative of those of the abstract artist, Piet Mondrian¹.

Our conversation started with a general discussion of quiltmaking in Australia. How quiltmaking represents a hobby, which gives a woman² the opportunity to meet with a group of friends without "upsetting the applecart at home". However, there can come a point at which there is a shift from the "warm and fuzzy" (and safe) activity to one of individualised expression and it is at this point that the activity might be considered 'art'. Hooworth pointed out that "to continue with quiltmaking at this level raises issues that are not faced by other artists; the quiltmaker is caught between two worlds"; that of the original expression of the artist and, the need to make a living "in the mainstream".

Quiltmaking is, after all, a world of clear definitions; appliqué, piecework, hand quilting - as Hooworth points out, in contrast to art practice: "Everything is all cut and dried and you need to be able to say, this is where I stand."

Writing in "The Art Quilt", Penny McMorris³ identifies a "tension between the traditional and the avant-garde" in quiltmaking and this is an issue that I have encountered when interviewing Australian quiltmakers; on one hand, the traditional quiltmaker is often wary of the change represented by the innovative quilt, while on the other, the maker of art quilts wishes to maintain a link with today's quiltmakers by clearly identifying themselves as 'quiltmakers' and the result as a 'quilt'. For Hooworth this can be a balancing act as she expresses herself as an artist by experimenting with format, colour and technique but makes her living by responding to the demand for workshops utilising a more conventional approach.

Hooworth then went on to describe her early experiences at art school, having shown "early precocious talent" and winning a scholarship at fifteen, and then embarking on what could have been a six-year course, "as long as it takes to train as a doctor". She married at twenty and was able to teach on a temporary basis, without that elusive "piece of paper". Motherhood and three children followed. Then the conundrum that faces so many women: how to maintain a sense of identity midst children, a home, and relationships?

Hooworth made her first quilt in the 1960s having seen some in the American magazines at art school. Adapting the techniques she had studied, particularly collage, she had found herself a medium of expression, loving the process, the "whole feel of it". In 1978, she attended her first class in traditional paper piecing, conducted by Trudy Billingsley at a local haberdashery store. This developed into meeting as a group to exchange ideas. Hooworth had found a creative outlet but believed she needed to learn basic quiltmaking techniques.

A commercial venture followed making quilts to commission with a woman who she had met though the quilting group. They worked well together, being compatible in terms of both quiltmaking, to which Hooworth brought her sense of colour and her business partner, technique, and finished product; their teamwork was seamless. They made quilts for beds, "the pretty, pretty stuff" and exhibited at the Craft Expo three times. Meanwhile, Hooworth was also teaching and knew that developing her own style was her "long term aim". With motherhood had come a loss of identity, particularly of herself as an artist but entering exhibitions such as the Tamworth National Fibre Exhibitions was exposing her work to a wider audience. She became involved with The Quilters' Guild and she was eventually elected President in 1989.

The death of this friend and by then ex-business partner at the age of fifty-three galvanised Hooworth into working on her 'own' quilts and developing her own distinctive voice which, although it may have been there from the beginning, was too often suppressed in respect of other demands on her time and creative output. In 1992, a quilt of hers, 'Phoenix', was accepted for Quilt San Diego and the next year, 'Composition In Yellow', for Quilt National in the United States. Now she felt "a justification for continuing". Her quilts still strongly referenced traditional quiltmaking in structure but were quite different in her extraordinary use of colour.

They were no longer quilts made for use on a bed but to be hung on the wall - art quilts. Her philosophy is to work with materials to hand, allowing chance juxtaposition of pattern, an improvisational method of working no longer to a preconceived plan, which allowed for the work itself to take over, and room for "gut feeling". Nevertheless, she believed it still essential to produce works that other quiltmakers could identify with; her continuing work as a teacher made this important - to strike a balance between making the quilts the way she wanted to and the need to earn a living. She told me a story of someone who came up to her at an exhibition and suggested that she must "have a psychological problem, using all that yellow" which, in the stranger's opinion was such an "aggressive colour". Hooworth admits to feeling "stunned" - but how times change. Hooworth's book to the published later this year, 'Razzle Dazzle Quilts', explains how to make use of such colour combinations which were considered shocking ten years ago!

Many year earlier, a rumpus room had been added to the family home. This was to evolve gradually into a studio for Hooworth, first as somewhere to work within the family then as a "room of my own". As she pointed out, "income equals the right to have a say" (proving the writer, Virginia Woolf right yet again when she maintained that in order to express herself creatively, "a woman must have a room of her own and money"⁴.

However, Hooworth's output still pointed in the two directions. Then in 1994, she was awarded The Quilters' Guild Scholarship, which allowed her to attend the 1995 Quilt Surface Design Symposium in the United States and go on to England and Europe to look at quilts; an opportunity to place in context what she was doing with the ensuing self-recognition that her work was legitimate in this wider context. Finally in 1996, she applied for and was awarded a $15,000 Australia Council Grant that gave her the freedom to spend six months to focus on moving ahead as an artist. Her theme was always to be "Mothers and Daughters" but she had originally envisaged doing this using photo imagery on fabric. She returned to working with collage and to life drawing classes. The tearing of paper became the tearing of fabric and a completely new direction evolved. (JAN - applique) Related to string piecing and appliqué, in quiltmaking terms, it comes closer in effect to individual brush strokes on paper and, as a result, fabrics, colours become layered and take on other meanings connected by the act of stitching.

I had first seen the 'Mothers and Daughters' series as part of the 'Colour Fields' exhibition at the Ku-Ring-Gai Art Centre in 1998. I was immediately attracted by the intense use of colour and the dynamic effect of swirling stripes of fabric. The series is made up of a number of individual quilts, in this instance exhibited together but at other times, exhibited as pairs. These are works that can be explored in purely formalist terms of colour, surface, structure and composition and as such, I believe work extraordinarily well. However, reading the visitors' book at the 'Colour Fields' exhibition, I was intrigued by a comment that Hooworth had "captured the personalities well" and then wanted to know more. Here were expressions of the mother-to-daughter-as-mother-to-daughter relationship, stunning in their colour composition and execution but how candid in their expression? Were these a representation of an idealised world too often reflected in quiltmaking (the nostalgic and potentially obfuscatory viewpoint, perhaps) or, could these be an expression of something more elemental?

My meeting with Judy Hooworth just over two years later now gave me the opportunity to ask this question directly. I found that I had missed the point; the swirling lines and possible points of intersection do reflect inter-connectiveness, but in the sense of, "whether you like it or not". As Hooworth explained: "I wanted to show the connectiveness between us but the differences as well. The more I thought about it the more I realised that I see each of these individuals in terms of colour... I mean, my really volatile daughter, the pink and red one (quilt), that's how I see her. She has that colour aura about her - I actually interviewed them all and talked to them about various things. I got my mother to write out her life story for me. So there was a whole lot of sitting and mulling over and thinking about it and then scribbling some things with crayons and then I thought that I could do this by talking about them in terms of colour - it's very expressive of how I was feeling at the time and what was happening in their lives and in mine at the time. Because it's such a labour intensive thing, you just put yourself into it all the time every single little piece of fabric and the way you organise it next to the other one it's a really expressive way of working. It all seemed to come together.... a very deep gut feeling and I can do it because I'm being allowed to do it.... and having had the reaction to the work that I had, I thought OK."

Question: Do you think they are still quilts?

"They are only quilts in terms of their construction - doing something totally different - I don't think of them in terms of quilts, I think of them as cloth/fabric/textile pieces. I don't think of these in terms of anything in particular, they are just what they 'are'. They just happen to be made out of cloth. They are also much more about cloth than any of these (earlier quilts) in that the organization of the pieces, the size of the pieces, you are thinking in terms of composition. These have a much more tactile quality because the edges are raw - but it's a totally different process of working and I find it really hard and emotionally draining."

With the exception of appliqué, a quilt is generally assembled in a flat plane whereas Hooworth's strips can be superimposed one upon another, creating multiple layers of meaning and are more sculptural. The result of such intense layering of fabric can result in distortions, some of the quilts don't hang flat as a result, another feature which moves them away from the conventional tenets of 'good' quiltmaking. Here are works that share both the fundamental nature of quilts in the present and also hint of what quilts could become, an absence of boundaries as to what quilt is or, what quilt is not; of what art is or, what art is not; while made up of the required elements (here I refer to the standard definition of a quilt as two or more layers of fabric held together by stitching), they transcend the medium.

I am indebted to Ozquilt Network Inc. for setting up this meeting and most importantly to Judy Hooworth for agreeing to meet and talk to me. While writing this article, I have found that comparisons with other artists have come to mind again and again; particularly the artist-as-mother-and-daughter experience as represented in Judy Hooworth's 'Mother and Daughter' Series. And for this reason, I would be very interested to hear from anyone who would like to discuss their ideas on the subject. Please email me SARAH (inquire@ozquiltnetwork.org.au) with your comments or views. I look forward to hearing from you!

© Sarah E Tucker 2001

1) This is in fact the 'double homage' referred to in the title, a reference to Amish quiltmakers and the artist, Mondrian.

2) I would maintain that quiltmaking does tend to be seen as a gender specific activity and this in itself raises issues of stereotyping; a traditional status which in itself brings a status as 'low' art at best. The Melbourne artist, Sally Smart explores this in her series, 'Femmage, Shadows and Symptoms' - her works are not exactly quilts but fragmented assemblages which I believe can connect with quiltmaking at this level.

3) Penny McMorris and Michael Kline, The Art Quilt, The Quilt Digest Press, 1996, 59

4) Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own; written in the 1920s but still relevant!