I am surrounded by Black Box and River Red Gum Forest.  The River Red Gums, Eucalyptus camaldulensis, grow right on the banks of the river and love to have their roots deep into the wet clay soil of the riverbank. They are the stately kings of the Australian river systems and have been voted as Australians’ favourite tree.

The Black Box trees, Eucalyptus largiflorens, grow further out on the edge of the floodplain.  They thrive in the hard, dry clay, surviving on rainfall with a deep drink every 3 to 5 years when the river breaks its banks and reaches them.   Despite the infrequent watering, they stand strong, sentinels of survival and markers of the floods and droughts that march across the country through time.

Black Box grow in stands that reflect the extent of previous floods when their seeds were deposited in fertile, wet soil at the very edge of the old floods.  A map of a Black Box Forest, especially one that shows the age of the trees, reveals the timing and size of past floods.  In fact, it shows the pattern and history of the river.

The forest teams with life – insects, spiders, microbats, birds, geckos, snakes, frogs, possums, monitor lizards, all find a home, food or shelter in the trunks, tree canopy, understory or leaf litter of the Black Box Forest.

The full moon reveals things not seen during the day; the pattern of the thick, rough bark; the tracery of the limbs that spread and intertwine overhead; the nocturnal creatures that hide in the hollows during the day and emerge to hunt and feed under cloak of night.  But the subdued light also casts shadows which form their own patterns and allow the viewer to imagine the other world that might exist here.

I see ladders and power lines, gantries and cranes, a roller coaster, pathways that I cannot take but others can and do.

There were so many levels of pattern to choose from so I tried to get them all in, very greedy of me but I couldn’t leave them out. So, I have depicted the pattern formed by the trees, their limbs, the understory; I have included pattern in the fabrics I have used and the manner in which I have used them. I deliberately kept the stitching simple and have overstitched the structural triangles I used to form the trees, then used triangular stitching in some of the black spaces as well. Oh, and the piece was made without a pattern! Finally, I used a patterned fabric for the backing of the piece, one of my favorites.

Commenced:     February 2023

Completed:        March 2023

Dimensions:      900mm H X 955mm W

                        39” H X 37.5” W

Materials: Black cotton and polyester fabric ground, commercial printed cotton fabric scraps, offcuts from completed quilted garment, Vliesofix, black and white coated fabric cut into fine strips.

Technique: Raw-edge appliqué with applied vliesofix in various sizes and shapes. Stitched down using zig-zag stitch on a domestic machine and then quilted on a small long arm.