FIBERWORKS - A CELEBRATION OF SOUTH AFRICAN
FIBER AND TEXTILE ARTISTS

Title: Fissures, Fossils and Fragments

Description: I have a broad academic and practical experience in the visual arts. In my ‘previous lives’ I have been art teacher, librarian, interior designer, perpetual student, wife and mother, all of which I have pursued with great enthusiasm. In the early days I was a self-taught contemporary artist, relying on books, magazines, and experimentation in evolving the quilting process. Since the first quilt show I attended in 1994, I have tried to attend every class available given by the more avant-garde quilters and have benefited greatly from these experiences.

My work is illustrative and I have always had an interest in fossils. This piece is part of a series called, ‘Stars on the Rocks,’ and is about my fascination for prehistoric life. Fossils in Renaissance times were thought to be ornaments strewn over the earth by some magical force. It was only in the 1800’s that it was understood that fossils were the remains of living organisms.

On a recent trip to the Smithsonian I was inspired to create a quilt depicting this, with imagery of a bedding plane of shelly limestone.

Title: Glacial Flow
Fragments, Fissures and Fossils series.

Description: During the summer the surface of a glacier may be covered by deep, thawing streams, washing debris into crevasses to form englacial moraine, containing paleogeological elements.

Motionless torrents, silent cataracts [Coleridge], a thawing stream through banks of snow.

Title: Divination Board

Description: Divination is practiced by all cultures, ranging from Australian Aboriginal to Native American.

This board is my interpretation of the African sand tray, which is knocked rhythmically with a stick, and the resulting patterns deciphered by the initiated.

Title: Volcano 2

Description: OL DOINYO LENGAI is the home of the Masai goddess Eng'ai, who displays her anger with eruptions and drought.

It is a place of pilgrimage for Tanzania's farmers, who entreat her for the most important things in their world - rain, cattle and children.

It is a place of regeneration, symbolised by the lichens which help break down the cooled and hardened lava, so that ferns can grow. Eventually these and other indigenous flora will reclaim the bleak lava field.

Title: The Medium and The Message

Description: The work is based on Marshall McLuhan's book "The Medium is the Message", which states that societies have been shaped more by the nature by which men communicate than the context of the communication.

This quilt portrays the manner in which communication, information and messages are given and perceived, whether encrypted or openly available on the information superhighway.

This network involves an understanding of language - spiritual, symbolic and literal and can be disseminated in many ways:
by pictograms, runestaves, gothic illumination, mathematical formulae, prayer flags, stone cairns, ideograms, semaphore, etc. are all encoded parcels of knowledge with which we convey ideas and cross the chasm of ignorance.

Jenny Hearn
P.O.Box 650372
Benmore
Johannesburg
2010

Cell: 0832636790
Phone: 27(0)117838321

Email: kabewhy@iafrica.com