An Exhibition

On Thursday between doing various errands, working on my Poetry Thursday post, and playing corporate employee at at tax seminar, I managed to fit in a visit to an exhibition by two local artists. Sue Spigel is a quiltmaker and Galina Kim is a painter in acrylics, heavily influenced by the tradition of icon painting. Recently they have been working in collaboration. Some of their works are separate works, some include panels of acrylics on canvas alongside quilted panels, and more recently Sue has been sewing the painted canvases into her quilts.

The current exhibition is called "On Pilgrimage". It results from a trip that Galina made to the Holy Land. Here are just a few of the works in the exhibition.



The quilt at the back is "Journeying Cloak for a Pilgrim" and the painting is "To St. Sabba"



The fish is painted on the fabric and black lines of machine quilting simulate a mosaic effect.



This piece is "The Burning Bush". Each of these two works have two panels of acrylic on canvas flanked by a quilted panel on each side. Sue uses a lot of printing, painting and stamping on fabric as well as some machine piecing. She has been working since the early days of quilting in New Zealand and I have seen her work grow from traditional piecing to a much more "arty" style. I didn't get many detail shots of the work, but these pieces really repay a close look. Some of the printing is of texts in different languages - Hebrew, Greek, English, Latin etc. There was a big controversy recently because she made an altar cloth for the Anglican cathedral here (a commissioned work) and it included a Sanskrit text, which some people objected to. In the end I believe a compromise was reached which allows the cloth to be used on certain occasions.