Ali George Artist

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.