I've been working on this small art quilt for the WAQA challenge. This year the challenge was a little different. We were each given a small piece of fabric with an Aboriginal print to incorporate into our quilt. You can see a piece of the challenge fabric in the bottom centre of the photo above.
If indigenous people made artwork showing white fella country what would it look like? Instead of the organic shapes, circles and dots used in traditional Aboriginal artworks to represent the land and waterholes maybe they would use geometric shapes to represent the built environment of European settlement?
In this piece I used fabrics in traditional earth colours found in Aboriginal artworks but used squares and grids to represent the cities and roads introduced by white fellas. The land has been torn and shredded. The emu's nest and kangaroo's hollow ripped apart by the buildings. Layers of the land have been peeled away by mining companies and waterways drained.
To begin this piece I went to my stash and pulled out fabrics with similar colours to the Aboriginal piece; reds, oranges, browns, blacks, greens and blues. I wanted to make a slashed quilt with lots of frayed edges so I included some organzas in with the quilting cottons. I layered up several fabrics in place of batting and then appliqued squares of various sizes onto the top layer. I sewed around all the squares before slashing the larger ones to expose the layers beneath. A run through the washing machine helped them fray more. I added a little hand stitching to keep them open. The edges are slashed and frayed too.
You'll be able to see this piece on display at QuiltWest next year.
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