Tamara Marwood Queen Victoria quilt, detail, 2005
In February I did do a little drawing that I liked very much - it was a drawing of Queen Victoria - a monument of her in Rosalind Park in Central Bendigo - she is holding a dove, or maybe a baby I like to think.
I then translated this drawing into a sewing piece - a quilt in fact. I have buried it in the cellar as I am a little ashamed of it - perhaps I might have a look at it over the weekend and a think.
Maybe I do love it - maybe it needs something else to make it the same love as I made it with the cotton and thread and a bent neck.
With a lovingly bent neck, Tamara Marwood has been sewing since childhood and drawing with thread since she first began formal art training. Her mother, great-grandmother and great-aunt were responsible for making this skill part of Tamara's life and play.
Now, as Tamara juggles the roles of curator, community cultural development worker, project manager and mother, she continues to play with the sewn line. To Tamara, art practice is "serious playful business" and, allowing for the complications of a hectic life, a daily commitment:
drawing, sketching, I promise to do this every day - I haven't done since the mum's group I have set up and this was a bit sketchy in itself as I was running around catching my baby from all sorts of misadventures on his crawling knees.
A portable, space-efficient medium, sewing appealed to Tamara as a new mother. Although she hasn't entirely put aside the cumbersome studio practices of drawing and painting, Tamara increasingly finds herself bent over needle and thread in quiet moments, and relishes that she can easily pick up where she left off when last interrupted.
Although Tamara uses some traditional craft techniques - patchwork is one of them - her work using thread is better described as drawing than needlework. On each patch of the Queen Victoria Quilt , Tamara has drawn in thread a study of a statue of Queen Victoria in Bendigo 's Rosalind Park. The green cotton she chose to contrast with a ground of grey linen is worked as a continuous line. At points the thread is loosely tacked down, guiding but not curbing the line as it gracefully loops into a form.
In places this form is easily read as an imposing monument, fixed to a pedestal. On other patches of the quilt, the statuesque mass of the Queen relaxes into a soft feminine figure and the dove about to take flight becomes a cradled bundle, maybe a swaddled baby.
Familiar with variation and repetition, the figure seems secondary to the fluid play of the thread. To borrow from the didactic writings of Paul Klee, the thread is a free line: "It goes out for a walk, so to speak, aimlessly for the sake of a walk." It is clear where the line begins its play, emerging from the underside of the linen. In some of the drawings, the end of the line disappears behind fabric once again but in other instances the frayed tail of the thread is waggishly loose.
Even more so than the line in a graphite drawing - a smearing of particles caught and consumed by the tooth of the paper's textured surface - a sewn line seems a free agent. In places, Tamara's thread is so loose that it buckles and sits up from surface in serpentine loops, the minimal tacking barely containing its fluidity.
To accompany Queen Victoria Quilt, Tamara stitched small cushions or pillows to encase speakers and these were shown as This Fountain Operates Without Water , a collaborative installation with sound artist Jacques Soddell, in both the Castlemaine State Festival and at the Breadbox artist run space in Perth in 2005.
The pillows are of the same grey linen as the Queen Victoria Quilt and similarly stitched in green cotton. However, in sewing abstracted organic forms on the pillows, Tamara manipulated her threaded line differently. While the thread intermittently escapes into loose flourishes and open ends, it is elsewhere pulled taught to form angular, closed shapes. Klee would have described these lines as active, hurrying lines, "More like a series of appointments than a walk." In places these short, energetic stitches coalesce, run parallel and criss-cross, to become blocked forms.
The practice of Paul Klee is illuminating in relation to Tamara Marwood's concept of art as serious play. Klee's artistic output is repetitively described as whimsical and fanciful, yet the use of line and colour in his work is allied to his rigorous and methodical investigation of theory and practice. Tamara might describe her work as play, yet her sewn drawings reveal an ongoing study of line.
Works such as This Fountain Operates Without Water and The Cascades , a series of digital and sewn drawings which earned Tamara a place as a finalist in the 2005 Robert Jacks Drawing Prize, champion the play of line over the skills of needlework. By contrast, Wallpaper Fountain , also made for the Castlemaine State Festival, reveals Tamara's developing investigation of traditional needlework forms.
In Wallpaper fountain, Tamara explores canvaswork (often a young person's first introduction to embroidery in the form of a canvaswork or 'longstitch' kit) whilst keeping her connection with the mark making of drawing practice. To imitate flocked wallpaper from the site of the work's initial installation, Tamara has used long, parallel stitches in red yarn to lay down the negative space of the wallpaper pattern, leaving open areas of canvas to articulate the floral design. The exposed ground, unusual in traditional canvas work, lays bare the graphite tracery of the artist's drawing on the front of the canvas and also shows straggly ends of yarn from the underside. In this way, Tamara has allowed the unruly line to creep into this more disciplined needlework practice, but not to dominate as in previous work.
For display, this length of canvas work was joined to form a continuous roll and then mounted on rollers inside a museum-like presentation case. A crank at hand level invites the viewer to activate a simple mechanism so that the entire length of the work scrolls beneath the case's glass top.
Three recent works, which Tamara made collaboratively with fellow Bendigo artist Matthew Byrne, are similarly presented in cases and deliberately evoke the museum display of maps in this manner. Matthew's cartographically inspired glass etchings, of fanciful topographies decorated with elaborate formal borders and mapping symbols, cover the presentation cases. In counterpoint, on linen patchwork scrolls inside the cases, Tamara has embroidered organic forms which describe the poetics of geography. These map-like landscapes of running stitch and large areas of closely worked, fine embroidery thread mark a definitive departure from the artist's free play of line; this is needlework and not drawing.
Notes
Tamara Marwood, written for the 6 june in Blogs , http://www.tamaramarwood.com/Blogs , Monday, June 13, 2005
Marwood, hot summer in Ibid., Wednesday, Jaswnuary 26, 2005
Jurg Spiller (Ed.), Paul Klee: The Thinking Eye. The notebooks of Paul Klee , Lund Humphries, London , 1961, p.105
