Well, this time last week I was just back from my first experience of this amazing celebration of all things quilt related. I had the pleasure of helping out in Christine's gallery on the Saturday morning - there is a lovely blog post here by Helen Conway which says much better than I can what a lovely and moving gallery it was. It was very engaging to spend the morning there greeting people who came to look, watching their reactions to the emotion and thought in the textiles, moving towards and away to get the detail and the overall view. In expressing her experience of watching her father succumb to dementia, it was obvious that these quilts and textile portraits were deeply moving to many viewers; they touch a chord with those of us who have watched one we love slowly disappear, piece by piece, as the mind fragments; I felt privileged to be there.
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| Christine Chester - Palimpset, detail |
So what is my newcomer's impression of the event? Astonishing, exhausting, inspiring, overwhelming, um, all those superlatives. It shows one how wide the umbrella is that embraces the term quilt; themes were as broad as human ingenuity can imagine:
there were traditional quilts,
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| Lynne Johnson - Billings Coverlet Reborn |
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| Liz Jones - All Things Bright and Beautiful |
art quilts
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| Chrry Vernon-Harcourt - Coastal Study 1 |
hand quilting,
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| Vanessa Stanfield and Tricia Neale - A Medieval Bestiary, detail |
machine quilting,
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| Ximo Navarro - It is not a dream, this quilt is real, detail |
pictorial quilts,
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| Hilde van Schaardenburg - The Threatened Swan, detail |
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| Sally Hutson - The Clothmakers Window, detail |
landscapes,
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| Kate Dowty - Marshwood Vale |
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| Jean McLean - Silence. Judges Choice |
quilts full of detail,
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| Kirsti Hovland - The Milky Way - Stars Wandering |
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| Kirsti Hovland - The Milky Way - Stars Wandering, detail |
quilts with presence,
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| Judy Doolan Kjellin - Sadness, detail |
those about ideas
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| Natalia Manley - Beyond the Black Hole. Judges Choice |
or poetry - in this case one of my favourites by
Yeats |
| Jill Exell - Stairway to Heaven |
or history,
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| Marisa Marquez - Lost Inheritance |
decorative embellishments,
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| Amanda House - Dragons Ho! |
some to be viewed from both sides
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| Sue Palmer - Bou Baretea, one side - detail |
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| and the other |
oh I could go on and on. I saw work there that was a million miles from anything I could, or would want to achieve, some that was akin to the tentative experiments I'm working with, some that I might perhaps aspire to one day. And I haven't even mentioned the marketplace!
It is marvellous to me to see how great the variety of human expression is when you come to a show like this, be it large or small. We see things and think, "gosh, I couldn't live with that", or "how on earth long did that take to achieve", others that leave us in awe of the skill or a technique, yet others that we could just gaze and gaze at. It is such a celebration of skill, artistry, invention, technique, thought, hand work, colour, texture; things which we are unique in being able to create and then use to express our endless inventiveness.
Here are a few more favourites
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| Gloria Loughman - Merrill Hall, Asilomar, California. Detail |
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| Kate White - Dragonfly Studies, detail. Judges Choice Contemporary Quilts |
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| Dianne Firth - Earth Bones |
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| Annabel Groom - Costa Rican Moons |
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| Christine Restall - Estuary |
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| Mary McIntosh - Copper Plates |
I loved it!
