Ali George Artist

This past week I've been trying to capture the changes brought by shadows - late afternoon subtlety and midday sharpness. I'm trying to develop a better sense of how texture is conveyed - the chair backs, the matt finish on the table, variegated lilly, louvres casting a shadow on the outdoor blinds. Transparency of liquid. Somehow I think I could develop an entire life's work simply from observing and playing with shadows. For now, sketching and developing a finer eye for the nuances of shade.  

  A very quick day trip to Sydney with Rebecca Staunton Coffey to see the Kandinsky exhibition and the amazing Louise Bourgeois exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Gobsmacked at the intensity and wonder of the Bourgeois exhibition and glad we saw it after Kandinsky. I loved the Kandinsky works yet I'd seen some of them at the Guggenheim in New York a decade or so ago. I knew what to expect and this time went with the lens of deconstruction and quilt making. How would I achieve that in fabric? Look what the subtle change of tone does here! Off white is powerful, who knew?  The Bourgeois exhibition, across two floors of the Gallery moved me to tears. No doubt for me it was the best exhibition I've ever attended, anywhere and will stay with me for a very long time.

There's so much pre-work and thinking I need to do before a single  piece of fabric gets cut. Weeks, and sometimes months. Moments here and there. Snatched time in between the myriad of other things that require love and attention.  These are initial experiments with a large scale tree - achieving different values in tone as well as challenging the notion of colour. There is still the thing about light, and the way the Moreton Bay Ash casts off the old skin for new bark each year. It's getting close to autumn and the evening light is softening - clear, fresh yet gentle after the ferocity of summer and scorched plants. The result of this testing and resolving a whole lots of textile and artistic tensions will be at A Sense of Place exhibition in late 2024 at the Warwick Regional Art Gallery.

  One of my favourite plants, this begonia contains the universe in its patterned leaves and I always imagine that each cell contains a solar system - all I have to do is fall into the space in between. I've photographed the patterns, expanded them to unrecognisable states of pixilation, drawn their exquisite shape in different scales and pondered the whys and wherefores of such a beautiful plant. Just because is the only answer I find. Just because.

  More experimentation using curved piecing (thanks for demystifying this Brenda Gael Smith) then stepping it up with pieced inner sections - trees and all sorts of odd configurations. I can see a larger scale version of this in our exhibition "Sense of Place" towards the end of the year at the Warwick Regional Art Gallery. 

  This pre-treated watercolour paper boiled away in a bundle of other papers for several hours - using an iron based bath - and produced some delightful prints. These have then been marked up, using a Micron pigment pen to delineate tonal and other changes within the leaf shapes. Some parts brought to life, with others left as is. Some thread, also dyed in the same pot, was then sewn into needle-point stab holes around the leaf shapes. A series of these will become my 2024 Christmas and Special Day cards.