Well I get to publish this at last! Finished ten days ago I have been lucky to be travelling the beautiful South Island of New Zealand with my work but no time till now to sit down and write this post.

Anatomy as a prompt was initially challenging for me because how do you look at your overall theme of New Zealand when thinking of the bodily structure of humans and animals etc. As I went through them I came across the spine! Of course the spine of New Zealand is the Alpine fault line! This is what I am representing in my response to the prompt and its interesting that I have been travelling all around the Fault Line these past days.

New Zealand has on average 14,000 earthquakes per year but most of them are either very deep under the earth or very low in magnitude. However we have had several major earthquakes in recent years particularly where I live in Canterbury. Major damage happened in 2010 and 2011 in Christchurch followed by another major quake in 2015 up the Kaikoura Coast line.

While these earthquakes were major we do as a country know that the Alpine Fault is overdue and that if it has a major earthquake it could rumble for 4 to 5 minutes and cause major damage throughout our country. This is compared with the 2011 earthquake that killed 185 people and only shook for 26 seconds!

While we live with this we are hoping that the recent major earthquakes have settled things for sometime so that we get on with life without giving it much thought.

In creating my piece I started with the Alps, strong grey mountains with some snow that are traditionally pieced like flying geese. Through the centre of these I created the fault line which I later quilted with the scientific measuring lines of continuous earthquakes.

New Zealand is usually a lush green place with the mountains as our back drop. We are a long skinny country made up of 3 islands. Surrounding us we have nothing but miles and miles of sea.

However swirling around us is the Pacific Rim Fault which continues to swirl and move every day. I have tried to capture this with the circles and the swirling quilting

You can see the quilting in the close up photo showing the marks representing earthquakes and the swirls around the seas.

40 in H x 24 in W Hand dyed and painted Fabrics. Machine pieced and quilted.