Rhonda Bracey: At Random

Better late than never! I attended a 4-day residential retreat with Gloria Loughman in early March 2020, just before the world went to hell in a handbasket with the spread of the novel coronavirus, COVID-19. I forgot to blog about it!

The theme was ‘The Abstract Landscape’ and we could use one of our own photos for inspiration, or one of Gloria’s patterns. Gloria also had hand-painted and hand-dyed fabric for purchase, or we could use our own fabric—commercial fabric and/or fabric we painted on the first day of the retreat. I used my own fabric with some from the piece I painted. The inspiration for my piece was a group of photos taken by others during Australia’s devastating bushfires in December 2019/January 2020. I didn’t use one particular photo, instead getting inspiration from the colours and silhouettes in them all.

Much of what we did is now lost from my memory (the changes in our world in the next few days, weeks, and months after the retreat dominated everything and so the details are now gone). But we did start with painting our 1 m pieces of white fabric. Because I knew I was going to do something based on fire, I painted an array of sunset colours from yellow through to deep orange. Once dry, we cut strips of fabric for our background from both our hand-painted fabric and any commercial fabric we were using and lightly stuck these down on another piece of 1 m white fabric, moving them around as required. I think freezer paper was involved.

Yellow/gold/orange fabric strips laid out to create the background

We kept building up our background, then added foreground details. My foreground was the burnt trees of the bush, and that’s where I thought I’d finish.

Background all done and sihouettes of blackened and burnt trees added, but it was still missing something

I then added batting and backing and quilted the piece just using straight-ish horizontal lines across the background and leaving the trees unquilted (except for some very close top-stitching to secure them safely to the quilt). But it was missing something to give perspective and the sense of enormity and hopelessness of these fires. So I hunted out a silhouette image of a kangaroo in full flight and added it in. Finally, I used Robbi Joy Eklow’s facing technique to finish the quilt.

I’ve called it ‘Run for your life’ and it’s for sale (I’ll add it to my Etsy store in the next few days). It’s an art quilt ready for hanging and is 57 x 44 cm / 22.5 x 17.25 inches.

Close up of part of the background and the horizontal quilting