one apiece

one apiece invited Tasmanian artists working in a range of media to experiment with textiles, creating an artwork beyond what is familiar to them, exploring how each artist’s primary arts practice might influence or inform the making of a quilt. These works sit within the realm of what is often considered domestic arts – a sphere marked by intimacy that reflects ideas of home – but these works speak of a broader world.

Thank you Adelphie He, Alexey Yemtsov, Carolyn Wigston, Chantale Delrue, Eri Mullooly-Hill Konishi, Donna Lougher, Kate Marshall, Mahdi Chandler, Miranda Rogers, Nicole Ottrey, Nicole Robson, Olivia Bowman, Roz Wren, Sisters Akousmatica (Julia Drouhin & Pip Stafford) and Tara Badcock.

Thank you Nicole Robson, Jason James, Penny Carey-Wells and thank you Levy Singleton for the exhibition title one apiece.

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Adelphie is exploring the theme of the complexity and simplicity relationship/connection between people/within community in a celebratory way. Their works are inspired by friendships and relationships around them/in their life. 

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Being a concert pianist and a teacher for more than thirty years, I can confidently say that I like working with my hands. I find they are the most wonderfully adaptive and intuitive tools a human can have.

The idea of crafting a “brick wall” quilt came to me from two sources: a mental image stored in memory and another passion of mine – woodwork. A long time ago I played a concert in regional NSW and I remember a view from a cheap hotel window that looked very much like the quilt. I don’t know why, but that image got imprinted in my mind.

As for woodwork – having made quite a few “end grain cutting boards”, where the blocks are arranged in a systematic fashion, I thought of making a board that looked just like a brick wall, but never got the chance to complete it.

I was very excited to try and create this image for the exhibition. It meant I had to learn another craft and I get to use the actual brick dimensions! I quickly realised that quilting is very different from woodworking simply because fabrics are not rigid as wood. Again I pay my respects to hands – they quickly adapted to the new material. As soon as that learning curve was over it became tremendous fun and I think we might be looking at another passion of mine.

www.yemtsov.com

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Carolyn works primarily with geometric abstraction within architectural form questioning and playing with the use of specific site related installations in both gallery and public locations. Using simple aesthetic shapes she aims to create instability and intrusion into familiar and presumed spaces.  

Splatter is an assemblage of smaller works. Each square is an individual artwork representative of Carolyn’s abstract paintings. When pieced together the squares are subverted by laying matching colours together. The quilting pattern is made of contour landscape patterns suggestive of a map.  

Splatter is from Carolyn’s current working series titled “Tools of Domesticity”. Focusing on the home and roles “played” within the domestic setting. The elements layered into this work aims to create an un-comfortability and in direct opposition to a quilts classical purpose. Carolyn wants the viewer to become sleuth and to discover the duality of the quilt. 

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The Bauhaus was founded by Walter Gropius in 1919 with its core objective of reimagining the material world to reflect the importance of all arts. The art movement also believed in the dissolving of the borders between artists and crafts people and championed the abstract style.

Inspired by early 20th century art of  the constructivists and Bauhaus, I used sparse geometric shapes and a minimal colour palette and modest materials to make this quilt. 

Trained as a painter and sculptor I enjoy  the meditative nature of hand stitching and working with fabric. I have used dyes extracted from native plants to dye the fabric with beautiful shades of subtle tones. This is then contrasted with the bright red wool that was dyed by Waverley mills in Launceston.

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For one apiece, I elected to create a child size quilt – something smaller, signifying slumber, cosiness, bed time, and warmth. My impetus was to use recycled materials – beginning with a collection of discarded Pana chocolate wrappers – their printed nontoxic coloured paper formed the basis of the quilt, while the grid type framework is recognisable from my earlier landscape paintings. 

I also recall each delicious cube of dark cocoa, shared over a cuppa as a desert. Concealed within this aspect of pleasure however, chocolate producers globally must substantiate that their chocolate is not the product of child labour – children enslaved on cocoa farms. Illegal deforestation is also associated with cocoa cultivation. 

The silvery shine of the aluminium foil on the flip side of the paper therefore – felt more stimulating and elusive. And, thinking about both sides of life, the skull emerged as a morbid symbol and whimsical reminder of the cyclicality of life – both death and rebirth, life and the afterlife.  

Chocolate skulls – calaveras, often associated with the tradition of the Day of the Dead in Mexico are a joyful celebration of life and food. “The Mexican … is familiar with death, jokes about it, caresses it, sleeps with it, and celebrates it. Death is not hidden away: he looks at it face to face, with impatience, disdain or irony.”  

My quilt relates to this tension between enjoyment of earthly pleasures and the awareness of their inevitable loss. 

Artist represented by Colville Gallery, Hobart.

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In my movement practice I let my body move from within. My body moves following impulses, sensations, and imageries that arise from within in relation to ever-shifting dynamic that surrounds and resides in me. Explore and stay with the Unknown.

Body always carries our life history stored deep inside as body memory. This can also inform our body movement. I wanted to reflect these in my first ever quilt making. Choosing fabrics that have some personal memories and following impulses, remaining curious in the process itself and trying to find solutions to the challenges as they arise.

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With a background in dance, I generally approach the making of a quilt subliminally or otherwise from the perspective of choreographing fabric. Choreography is the arrangement of elements in space and, in my opinion, the making of a quilt equates to the arrangement of fabric in space.

Dance is a technique driven artform with the primary focus being the pursuit of excellence, even perfection. While my quilting arts practice strives for the same level of technical expertise as my dancing, the aspiration for perfection is a conundrum because perfection is not really humanly achievable, with many saying in quilt-lore that only god is perfect.

The title Allsorts refers to my simple love/addiction for Licorice Allsorts but mostly a childhood memory that stays with me, of my mother saying ‘that it takes all sorts’.

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In my soft sculpture practice I play with textures and colours, invoking a tactile vocabulary to explore themes of embodiment, vulnerability, femininity, and sexuality. Sometimes I improvise, sometimes I design and plan, always letting the concept decide the evolution of the piece. 

I approached this quilt in a similar way to my sculptures, beginning with a reflection on an embodied experience. However, I allowed the visual depiction to collapse and flow across a flatter form.  

The Heavy Soft engages textures both body-like and bed-like, and colours both soft and cool, to process and sit with an unexpected emotional low in a happy time of life. The improvised, wrinkled, sometimes raw-edged, patchwork adequately encompasses the complex muddle of heavy feelings forcing my body to sink softly into them. 

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The landscapes of Southern Tasmania inform my work. The focus is usually on light, colour, pattern and texture. Observation of my natural world, land, sea and sky leads to a wide range of experimentation. Colour or lack of it in the short winter days has lead me to this muted colour palette. Ideas are usually gathered on walks exploring this unique environment. This approach has kept me busy for over 20 years. Working with mixed media allows me to dabble with any media and I do, more recently ceramics and handmade paper developing 2D and 3D forms. Dyeing, printing and collecting materials directly from my environment helps contribute at various stages of the process. Folding, pleating and layering sheer fabrics, reflecting ripples in the shallows of the D’Entrecasteaux Channel started this particular adventure. 

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My Backing? Paper creamy and white like this sheet of old curtain. My Wadding? All my mistakes all the badly cut fabric, all the ideas of what else this quilt could have been. My Quilting? Black stitching, drawn on like the black ink that I love. My Binding? Creamy white paper again. (Well it’s really an old curtain but we can pretend.) My Practice? I work with paper, I draw, print and make zines. The template I designed is based on the template I often use to fold my zines. I really struggled working without my trusted friend paper. I started to break the quilt into parts of a zine, it became easier for me. I’m not an artist that plans much beforehand. Numbers and measurements are not my friends. So I just dove into cutting and assembling my quilt. When I discovered you could draw with thread the quilt and I became friends. In my hurry to just see if I could make a quilt I used the fabrics from my printmaking rag bag. It felt good to make things out of fabric that I had carried around on my body. I made it while sitting on the couch watching Disney movies and hospital dramas. This is where a lot of my art is conceived, in my PJs with my cat, a sketchbook and a cup of tea. I drew a comic about my making process. My quilt became a zine but soft and tactile. 

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My primary arts practice is to make costumes. I like these to be pretty amazing costumes constructed from things I have spent literally years collecting and colour sorting, packing carefully away until the right project comes up for them to come out and shine! I love to research carefully the period or genre I want to work in. I often amass a variety of images and inspiration on pinterest as a first step. I also love to find existing clothing or fabrics I can use as a starting point. With these resources in place I then start sketching and experimenting to see what evolves. I play with the fabrics and trims extensively on my cutting table to see what looks good and what speaks to me. I take photos of the different collages and play until I am happy with the arrangement. A bit like my flower arranging efforts!!!  

This time I have used this same process and dived into my bags of left over treasures from this year’s massive and totally obsessive project- Priscilla Queen of the Desert. I have decided to make a memory quilt, in crazy patchwork in the cone shape of one of my favourite costumes. The Gumbie pants.

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I have been experimenting with printing images on fabric and rephotographing them as final artworks. I find the way the image breaks down and misprints, coupled with the effect of different fabrics, with a variety of translucency, creases, folds and scrunches, transport the image to a new reading, discarded but still treasured like an old handkerchief or tea-towel. Memories, secrets and moments fading in and out.

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My practice transforms everyday, obsolete materials into unexpected forms, focusing on process and repetition. I find and pull apart discarded materials, reassembling them in ways that interrogate our expectations about their form and purpose. The history and practice of quilting is a surprisingly apt fit.  

Security envelopes conceal confidential information using internally printed patterns; the patterns, imperfectly concealed, advertise the nature of envelopes’ contents while saying nothing of them. Printed in blue and black, the repeating designs would also suit clothing or upholstery. 

The men’s shirts of this quilt are castoffs of masculine-coded uniforms expected in corporate environments. Similar to security envelopes, clothing conceals a body while telescoping something unspoken (and expected) about its wearer. The repeating patterns and colours deepen the connection between shirts and envelopes. 

These shirts were thrifted for a quilt made by a friend in 2012 and gifted to a mutual. The maker donated the leftovers to me – once again obsolete and surplus to someone’s needs. 

This quilt approximates the size of A0 paper, four times the size of standard A4 paper. The red quilted pattern is scaled up from its size relative to a stamp. 

This quilt has reminded me of the importance of practice, process and progress in my making, of embracing not knowing exactly the form of the end product, and the challenge of being a beginner. Like paper, metal and clay, fabric has its habits and preferences, and working with it is a conversation and collaboration. 

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The quilt shown here revealed itself to me a week before the delivery date.

For ages I had been working on something very different, the idea being ‘Deadlines; the story of my life!’ but it was not working for me and I was in a quandary.

On Sunday 30/7/23 I was treated to an Elsewhere Sauna in paradise.  I threw myself into the ocean and indecision into the fire. I came home invigorated and started my quilt again.

 I dug out all my samples and examples, the unfinished and unloved plus some favourite stitched pieces and collaged away. The layout was ready within a few hours. Decision made.

 It is true that my professional life is ruled by deadlines, but this piece is born out of the love of fabric and a needle in my hand, the monotonous sound of my sewing machine, the alchemy of natural dyeing and the exploration of new processes.

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A quilt is a love affirming object imbued with radical potentialities.¹ Sisters Akousmatica value and nurture a connection to the ‘hand crafted’ through our expanded radio practice. We acknowledge the long history of work created by women, and the creative possibilities that are sewn, seeded, patched together, and passed down by individuals and collectives. We are inspired by radical histories of quilt making, the everyday rhetorics of resistance² embedded in the creative and practical work of our mothers, grandmothers, great-grandmothers and so on. 

Constellations is a project, inspired by the words of Anne Hilde Neset and the Her Noise Map,³ which was seeded at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA), Melbourne, in 2018 during our residency at Norma Redpath House for Doing Feminism/Sharing the World.⁴ For this event we invited members of the public to write the names of inspirational women and non-binary sound artists on a circle of fabric. Constellation 001 is the first map-quilt-antenna of this project, which is necessarily unfinished and on-going. Like the Her Noise Map it aims to collect, amplify, and provide a visual representation of women who have contributed to the sound, music, and radio arts fields through their experimentation, skill, and persistence, but should not be considered an exhaustive list: make your own map.

¹Jess Bailey, Many Hands Make a Quilt: Short Stories of Radical Quilting, Common Threads Press, 2021
²As coined by Vanessa Kraemer Sohan in Lives, Letters, and Quilts : Women and Everyday Rhetorics of Resistance. University Alabama Press, 2019.
³Anne Hilde Neset, Tangled Cartography: The Mapping of Her Noise’, Her Noise Archive <https://hernoise.org/tangled-cartography/>.
⁴Doing Feminism/Sharing the World, was a residency program as part of Professor Anne Marsh’s ARC project of the same name. Make your Own Map was a workshop at ACCA Melbourne, presented by Sisters Akousmastica during the Round Table public programs, for the exhibition Unfinished Business: Perspectives on Art and Feminism. 

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I’ve been contemplating my mortality more and more over the past couple of years and pairing this with my ongoing love of ritualistic, commemorative, instructive & talismanic textile objects, I decided to make a very personal ‘quilt’ that toys with the notion of quilts as comfort objects.

For the creation of this shroud-quilt I have utilised a process I use in my textile artworks a lot of layering, piecing and overlaying textiles with treasured antique fragments of woven silks, tapestries, metallic lace and other found materials in order to create a richly textured and visually intriguing whole, with an underlying story that unfolds the longer the piece is inspected and contemplated. For me every scrap of fabric, lace, braid, ribbon, etc is heavily weighted with the stories and shared histories of the (more often), female makers who originally created them. These ghostly traces of the hand of other makers then become woven into the new textile ‘body’ of work I’m creating. It feels like a kind of conversation with the dead & their incredible legacy of skilled crafts(who)manship.