Portfolio of Works

The ironing board was a tool used by mothers and daughters (a work table comparable to the men’s workbench). The heritage ironing boards with their sixty inch length and eighteen inch width (similar in stature to the female quilter) are a window, to a domestic period when labour divided gender and to the quilters who worked with what was ‘found’ to create their works of art. 

Lepidoptera are like a visual illusion in their metamorphosis. First they are one thing and then another. The butterfly shape is visible in the negative wood space of the moth images; and the moth shape is visible in the negative wood space of the butterfly images.  

My non representational work combines fact for their hard-edge painting ‘quilt’ and imagination for the potential of the ‘river’ curving line. 

The work came out of an art trip to Hungary. During the descent over Budapest I was overcome by the power of the Danube River for its length and curves. I photographed the aerial landscape through the airplane window. Combined with my observation that an airplane view of the earth looks like a patchwork quilt, the rivers represented in my paintings are the winding gesture (that reveals the birch veneer support) cutting through the ‘quilt’ as an aerial landscape.

Patterns in my work contain visual illusion. The shape I work with as a constant, the rhombus, can form a hexagon, cube or six-point star. I work with positive and negative space and always reveal the support as an element in my work. 

I began my career as a fashion designer and my painting continues to reflect my interest in textiles and clothing. The work I have done informs my research into antique quilts. The paintings show the process of struggle required for utility quilts. The struggle is to assemble old clothing, to improvise and problem-solve when there is not enough fabric to sew a cohesive quilt pattern. My interest is in how these limitations have produced visually engaging work. The titles started with the names of traditional Amish quilt patterns painted on canvas and then moved to names of flowers I have photographed in my garden, painted on birch. Through distortion of the photograph and an iterative process of colour selection, the soft lines of flowers become hard-edged paintings; evocative of quilts, the ‘scraps’ of colours rarely repeat yet remain visually balanced.