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³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ radio 4 had a programme last Tuesday evening, 3rd April, about the last summer and this prompted the posting of my remaining 4 Journal quilts, also that five are about to be shown at the

There was a time line of events that led to this work being created, first I have always admired greatly Artists who make statements about life in their work and here I am not just referring to visual Artists but All Artists, I think most peoples first encounter with this type of Art is Music, pretty pictures, easy listening music, fun plays, light hearted novels, etc. all have their place as we all need to relax, let go, wind down, or we really would ‘go mad’ but injustices, hardship, censorship, etc. also need to be exposed, it makes us uncomfortable but never as uncomfortable as the lives of the people living with injustices, hardship, censorship, etc.
I have long wanted to create this type of Art but it is not easy to make your point clearly and loudly, as the journal quilt project is about an Artist pushing personal boundaries, with technique, subject, method, etc. I decided to completely change my subject which also meant trying new techniques and methods.

Timeline

about her feelings with what was happening in and what she has witnessed when she had visited

Dijanne had given links to 2 blogs she is reading I became (and still am) interested in the quotes with links often posts, I followed many of the links and found myself reading , and most interesting as it is written by Israeli citizens, on AI influenced me a great deal.

News reports and interviews by the beeb.

These are 2 journal quilts from last summer with the statement I wrote at the time, the June journal can be seen next weekend (13-15 April) at , it is one of the five I sent into the Journal Quilt Project the other 4 are January, March, August and September, I will post photos with statements of August and September next week,


June 2006
Woman 6, this journal started with 2 images – reflecting, but then current affairs strongly influenced me and the journal changed, I feel like my art is running way ahead of me and I can’t catch up, so my reflecting women became 2 women each caring for their family but one has all modern aids to make her life easy by contrast the other woman has to make her life easy, on the contrary obstacles are constantly being created to make her life more .



July 2006
Woman 7, this journal continued the theme set by the June journal and is made in similar style and technique except I used acrylic paint for the June journal which kept drying too quickly, so I used water based printing ink for the July journal and there is a bit too much, still what I like about the mono print method for these is it looks like graffiti on a wall and is what it is all about, as the current controversy was about one soldier when the people of the soldier have of the other peoples citizens in prison, the striped fabric represents the bars of prison, .


2007 as the words do not show well here they are:

top left column: you have captured 1 of our soldiers

top right column: you have captured 750 of our citizens


bottom across the 2 columns: Democracy means Equal rights

on the centre panel: C20 Berlin C21 Palestine (on the work the C circles the number to represent Century)

oophs I meant to post this Monday

The second part of was on Tuesday night you can hear both episodes using the beebs listen again facility, I do not have a television and do not buy national newspapers so I do not see visual images of the news reports except through the internet, so I did not see all the photos of Lebanon last summer that many of you may have seen, this means that when I do see an image it has a far greater impact, again I am posting the photos of the journals with the statement I wrote last summer,

August 2006
Woman 8, when I heard of all the children killed at my heart went out to their mothers, women give birth/life, men take life/kill, how to express my feeling, I do not have T.V. but do use the internet and read blogs, through a series of web links I came to a page with photos of Qana, the horror of seeing lines of children wrapped in clear plastic, that says it all so that would be my journal.



September 2006
Woman 9, one of the many things revelled to me whilst researching, is the many landmines and unexploded devices Israel has left on Lebanese land, dangerous weapons to harm the young and innocent, I thought also of the hard work Princess Diana did to stop the use of landmines and make armies responsible for clearing land of dangerous weapons when they leave, women give birth, men kill.



Owing to having to have the September journal in Houston by the end of the month and being in Scotland I like to leave plenty of time for the British and USA postal services to deliver by 30/09/06, so the September journal was started in August while the was still on,

the killing finally stopped, but has it? Israel left hundreds of cluster bombs to continue the killing, like landmines these bombs kill mainly children and innocent people, I was pleased when the British government announced they would stop using cluster bombs but disappointed that they have not stopped immediately, I think they are stopping in 2008, one reason I heard given was because they already have them in stock and ‘have’ to use them up!!!! I sometimes wonder what kind of mind thinks up ways of killing, what kind of person works in industries that make them, do they even know what they are making?

As you may by now realise I became very melancholy creating these small quilts and so far have not created any more,

well my attempt into creating art work that makes a statement failed so I guess I should stick to the pretty stuff and leave statement Art to those that can do it better than me,

the met with a deafening silence (no comments) and the made some people comment on the Iraq war and most concentrated on men and war when the point of the journals quilts is the Killing of Children,

some people did understand but the fact that the first comment was so far from what the journals were about means I did not get my point across,
CHILDREN were KILLED, also I had written in large print:
USA Prestwick Israel Qana
then in small print:
ashamed to be british
I thought that writing the first part larger would alert people to the fact that that was the most important wording and that the smaller writing was referring to the incident in the large writing but judging from the comments I don’t think I succeeded, I would welcome any comments that would help you as a viewer to realise what the important point of an Art work is,

I found it curious that comments seemed more interested in my side comment of women nurturing and men killing than in the KILLING of CHILDREN and one commenter even seemed to imply that because women have killed too that makes it OK,

I have throughout my life been told I see things differently to most, I mistakenly thought the journals would make people more aware of the senseless Killing of Innocent Children,

while I was working on the journal quilts I was also making my quilt for the grab bag challenge, for this each participant has to put fabric and embellishments in a bag and send it off to the coordinator, your bag is then sent to another participant, you do not know who, you receive a bag of fabricsand you do not know who’s bag you have, well 3 weeks after the bags had been sent to us mine had not arrived in Scotland, I e mailed the coordinator and she sent me some of her fabric, she said she matched them as close as she could to the originals but from that moment on I just never felt like I had a ‘proper’ grab bag, here’s a photo of the original grab bag,

and the substitute grab bag,

well all those warm colours are not me so I had a lot of trouble with this, inspiration totally deserted me, I liked the bright pinky/orange sunset fabric and the black and white stripe, there was a funny thing that looked a bit like tree bark (I found out it was waste from the silk industry) so in the end I made 4 blocks with the sunset fabric and beaded them like bursting fireworks and did another 4 blocks by manipulating the B&W stripe, put them together with the barky thing in the middle and made a border, I like the border best,

Nine Squares,

Detail

Statement

the quilt I made was for Lynne Croswell, Vermont USA, Lynne says she loves it, I hope she likes it,

sorry I forgot to say in the previous post the conditions for making our quilt was to use at least a third of the fabric in the grab bag for the quilt, so you could add fabric from your own stash and the quilt finished size had to be 20 inches square,

one member of the grab bag challenge group lives in Netanya, Israel, so we were all concerned for her last summer, she assured us that Netanya was out of firing range, nothing was normal and tension was great for her though,

the grab bag I sent out I put about half Harris tweed as my fabric because I wanted/hoped the person who received it would enjoy using some of the tweed,
the grab bag I sent,

Susan Pel-Or, Netanya, Israel received my grab bag and made a beautiful quilt for me, Sue used all the tweed as the earthy background and cut star flowers from the silk, I really love it, using the tweed and a garden, as well as textiles I love my garden,

Cultivate the Stars by Susan Pel-Or, Netanya, Israel

Detail photos

I saw a photo of Sue’s quilt when the coordinator posted it and a couple of weeks later the quilt arrived in Scotland but I did not see Sue’s statement for another month when the coordinator sent out a cd with all the quilts on, there were over 70 artists involved in this so it was no mean feat to take 2 photos (full size and detail) and prepare all the statements (we had all sent our statements by e mail so the coordinator set them out with the photo of the grab bag), then burn over 70 cd’s and package them and finally send out,

Statement

I had wondered about the grid like shape of the background of Harris tweed and concluded from seeing the quilt that it was because I had only just put in sufficient tweed to cover the 20 inch square (I had not expected someone would use every scrape of tweed) since reading Sue’s statement I wonder if it is the background grid that makes the visual tension she sees or because it brings back memories……..