A Quilt in Australia

Several years ago I sent a quilt to an Australian exhibition, the first time I know of that a quilt of mine was shown ‘down under’. That was Shapes 27: Reflections on the Nine Patch, where I was experimenting with reflector fabric, some shiny fabric I had once been given by a friend, and loose end in the quilting.

Shapes 27: Reflections on the Nine Patch, 90 x 90 cm

 

When light falls onto the quilt in certain angles,
other Nine Patch shapes become visible as well.

Glitzy fabric in the dark, reflector fabric, and loose end in the quilting

It might be possible that one of the SAQA shows I was in was shown in Australia? I’m afraid I am not good at keeping track of where my quilts are going when they are touring the venues without me…

This weekend, however, my quilt “Between Portals” is (at the point of writing already: was) being shown at the Australasian Quilt Convention in Melbourne, as part of the group exhibition by 20 Perspectives, “Doors, Windows and Portals”. 

 

Julie Haddrick secured the opportunity to show there for the group, Anne Bellas and Phyllis Cullen traveled as clandestine quilt transporters, and the three of them are rocking the show.

Phyllis Cullen (left), Anne Bellas (middle), Julie Haddrick (right)

 

View into the exhibition hall

Unfortunately, they have reported that lighting in the halls is not very conducive to taking good pictures, 

In this picture, my quilt is hidden behind the perpendicular little angle

 

so if you want to have a good look at all the pieces shown, please take a look at the group’s website, especially the gallery for this specific exhibition: https://www.20perspectives.com/new-gallery-images

In the middle of hanging the exhibition

 Today things got serious. After a quick trip to the market where I saw live proof that mushroom season is going strong now (people here get completely wild about picking mushrooms out in the woods, I myself have always been rather reluctant to eat any like that, especially after the Chernobyl accident)

I bought a few more curtain rods that I am using for hanging quilts, and then bundled the listed ones up, rather unceremoniously, I am afraid.

I confess - I didn't feel like doing this exhibition at all! I am tired after the work week, I was a bit hesitant about the location, and basically I had agreed to do it because I was offered the slot in the museum's exhibition schedule, and this will be a 'first time' art exhibition in the local history museum. That's an honour you don't turn down, especially not since I did receive the city's Culture Prize a couple of years ago. But. Andrea Soller from the town hall has been extremely helpful and active and has made it a lovely experience so far. The city bought new display walls, with lighting. They printed a lovely poster

and invitation cards and flyers, she has made the name tags for the quilts and just couldn't have been kinder in any way.

And when I went into the museum this afternoon I was surprised. Because I could tell immediately that this room has a lot more potential when you can see it 'bare' of other things.

So my husband and I set about and have come approximately half way through the process. The glass cases come with a bit of tricky issue as there are no hooks to hang into the vertical rods which usually hold shelf boards. Despite my well-prepared plan it is taking a little bit of time. "So this is what the big fuss about hanging is all about?" was my husband's question at some point. When he asks things like that it's never easy to tell whether he is pulling your leg or being really sarcastic with a bit of a nasty tone, and then it's best to simply ignore what he said. I simply said "Yes, and we are doing very well here," and let him hold something. He was a big help, though, it would have been very unpleasant to do this without additional hands, or somebody to step back and tell whether the quilt is indeed straight in the horizontal.

Here are a few pictures of how far we have come.

To be continued (and hopefully finished completely) tomorrow. And I am very, very happy with how it looks so far. I was impressed at the atmosphere of the room which has changed completely from how it used to be when I went in for the various history exhibitions I have seen there. I am actually excited about it now.

The opening is next Saturday, at 10.30 a.m. You are cordially invited!

On Quiltkarussel Podcast

Ten days ago I was guest of Emanuela Jeske in her German language podcast on quilting, patchwork and sewing. We had recorded the session a week in advance. We had first been in touch when the SAQA Europe/Middle East "Orient Express" started rolling through Europe, and the group had thought it would be nice to have a feature there, but that didn't work out for various reasons. Emanuela and I had been writing back and forth, and at some point she suggested that the two of us do that particular episode together. Which I reclined because I was not one of the people who had been overly active in the organisational matters of the Orient Express. But as my exhibition is coming up now I had agreed that we do a session on that occasion. Here is the link to the episode, as I said, in German only, sorry to non-German-speakers: https://quiltkarussell.podigee.io/92-uta-lenk

It was fun to talk to Emanuela, whom I had met briefly in person in May at the Guild's Patchworktage in Meiningen. We had not agreed on any topics beforehand, and I was simply answering her questions on the spot. Which worked well, and I think it was much more natural than if we had pre-arranged any topics.

 Tomorrow I will start hanging the exhibition and have just gone through my list of "do I have enough rods to hang them all"? 

 

Of course I don't, but shops are open on Saturday mornings, so I can still get some. And it will be another entire week before the opening, so if something is still missing, there will be time to get it.

Actually, I would have really liked to show the quilt that is currently the header for the blog, "Everyone has the right", which has just been on display at Birmingham with SAQA's Forced to Flee. But it hasn't returned yet and Bill Reker had not been too optimistic that the turnover of the exhibition coming back from UK to SAQA shipping centre would be fast enough to get it back to me before the exhibition opens. Well, there is still another week.

Seven weeks lost.

 We have been living in this small town for just over 17 years now. From the very beginning I knew that the open air pool is THE highlight of the town. (By now I know it is the only highlight, but...) When we moved here, my son was 11 weeks old and I would take him in the baby carriage, park him on the side of the pool, with enough distance, and swim for a while, look out whether his feet were still appearing every once in a while when I was on a turn. After a few weeks that life guard would do a little baby sitting if I happened to be there with only few visitors. Ever since I have made it a point to take my first plunge on the first day of opening, usually during the first days of May), and go as frequently as possible. Definitely when it is raining, because then I will have the pool to myself.

This year I was off to a good start, had gone frequently and was in pretty good swimming shape, but when I caught the virus that stopped, of course. Couldn't go while I was still tested positive, and couldn't go afterwards because I was too weak. When I went back to work I just could not muster any energy in the evenings to dive in. After we returned from vacation it took me a couple of days to get back into a bit of a routine with driving to work, running all the errands that needed taking care of, but now I have gone back to the pool. Of course, by now the season is almost over. I started back middle of this past week, but they will close a week earlier this year than usually because of some renovations. So in the end I probably won't have had the full worth of my season's pass, as I missed out on seven weeks of swimming.  That is a big disappointment. But I am trying to console myself by telling me I should be happy that I am swimming again without any respiratory problems or other post-Covid symptoms as you hear from so many people.

So when I have time I am working on the 'Nature' prompt for 20 Perspectives.

I have cut up a piece of hand-printed fabric that was never much of a success, but that is fitting in perfectly for the arrangement here.

And I am planning where to hang which quilt in my upcoming exhibition. Two days ago I received the floor plan. In the end I think I will be able to hang more quilts than I calculated, but because of the location it might not be very orderly. I have to make do with whatever width of hanging space available in sometimes odd places, and it might be a bit of a jumble. I have decided to not be bothered by this.

It is a solo exhibition in a museum.

Nature Award Nominee?

The other day I awoke after a hot and rather restless night with just a memory of a snippet of a dream hovering in my mind. I had been told that “o(round)moon” had been nominated for the Nature Award. 

 

No clue who was giving this award, where this would have happened – nor did I find out whether anything came of the nomination in the end. Of course, this lingered, because I don’t frequently remember my dreams.

The quilt was made for SAQA’s exhibition “text messages” several years ago, traveled with that exhibition for three years and is, I have to admit, one of my all-time favorite makes. It has been quite a while since I made it (2013!), and it must have been on my mind because of a new project I have started with Barbara Lange, 

 

which in turn made me remember the important role this particular quilt plays in the conception of my series “text messages”. 

When making it, I realized that several quilts that had gone before also had a topic of text messages. This one, although it was the first one to actually receive the title “text messages” was no. 8 in a whole “new” series!

I am currently also turning ideas in my head about the piece for the next 20 Perspectives’ challenge, which has the broadly stated topic ‘nature’. 

 

Quite possible that’s how the whole combination came about. I will include o(rounD)moon in the exhibition I have here in my town in October. And quite possibly the Nature-inspired one as well.

Towards an exhibition

 

text messages: Vilhelm Lundström,
made in response to a challenge for the group 12 by the Dozen,
2018, 40 x 40 cm

Today I took a (sort of) inventory of my quilts. I have an exhibition coming up in October, in our local museum. This is not an art museum, it has a standard exhibition that concentrates on local history of pottery as it was common here in the 18^th to early 20th centuries. The museum has won prizes and is famous amongst pottery circles, the early 20^th century e.g. was a time when migrant workers came here from northern Italy. Special exhibitions are shown regularly, though, and recently there have been exhibitions about the times of World War II, or the history of water in the city. The new director (who is the first director with an academic background and not doing this as a volunteer and has been here for a couple of years by now) is trying to diversify in terms of topics that will be dealt with. Currently they are showing a recollection of the 40 years of the city’s professional women’s volleyball team which has been playing in the first national league for several years.

Greening Rothko, 2016, 45 x 80 cm,
made as contribution to one of the challenges for
International Threads

 

I was offered to do this exhibition in the context of the attempt at diversification of topics, and as 2017 recipient of the Kulturpreis (Cultural Prize) of the city. Indeed, during my nursing course I had at some point thought I would not ever again try to do a solo show, I felt so drained artistically, and there wasn’t much time to spend on planning, designing, executing (enough) quilts that satisfied my personal standards regarding artistic merit. But the museum is not too big, so when the director and the city’s cultural manager approached me with this idea, I agreed to this adventure. I figured it might perhaps be another incentive to spark my creative impulses.

Mapping my inner world,
2018,58 x 105 cm

 

Hanging in the museum is going to be a bit tricky because the display cases are glass-fronted cases with some unusual shapes and widths. Although the city is having a few display walls made, I will mostly need to refer back to smaller sizes, and I really had no clue as to how many smaller quilts I have in stock. It was an interesting dive into my history of quilt making, and a rediscovery of some I had more or less forgotten. That happens when the website is unsufficiently maintained (and it has been disfunctional for a while now anyway, that’s another thing I need to get fixed before the exhibitions is actually on). Most (or at least many) of them have never been exhibited because they were made as group challenge quilts. Some of them I was surprised to see with a temporal distance and realize that they werent’t bad at all.

 

Challenge 3, 2014, 40 x 80 cm,
made for a challenge of International Threads

I concocted a list of what I have, measured some (or most) of them and was relieved that I should be able to fill the space of the museum with smaller quilts, but the actual matching of the widths with the plans of display cases still remains to be done. I also have to clarify with the cultural manager how many display walls there are indeed going to be so I would be able to hang a few larger or at least not really small quilts as well.

The piece which is currently traveling with the SAQA-exhibition “Forced to Flee” is bound to return home at some point in the fall, as the Festival of Quilts is supposed to be the last place where the exhibition will be shown, at least that is the current state of affairs. The picture currently shown at the top of the blog is a detail from that piece. That is one of the bigger quilts that I really would like to show. But, ironically, after FoQ the show will go back to the States before the individual quilts are being sent back to their owners, and that turnover may take longer than the opening date for my exhibition. We will see. The inventory session at least has given me the secure feeling that I will be able to hang enough quilts, even if it may not be an entirely coherent show.