I like to look close to home for my artistic inspiration. Here are the current ones.

This is a footpath that winds around a large block of empty land where a railway used to come through town. The path cracked and was repaired quickly because the intention was that it would eventually be pulled up and replaced. But some of it is still there, though not for much longer as buildings encroach onto the unused land. Oh, what a textile this will make!

I had a friend who taught me to water ski when we met in high school in 1971. I met him again recently after nearly 50 years – still that connection you get with some people. He used to tell me that if I didn’t fall off (the waterski), then I wasn’t taking enough risk. The lesson is that it is OK to fail, to end up outside the original plan, or to not follow the pattern. Sometimes the beauty is not in perfect execution but in learning how far you can go onto the outside edge before you fall off.

These two are the same photograph, the bottom one rotated 180 degrees. The top one shows a lovely riverbank with the gnarled roots of Eucalyptus camaldulensis, the river redgum, reflected in the water. I love that these photographs record an ephemeral moment. The river was rippling gently, the sun was at the correct angle, the photographer was in the perfect position. The tree had been there for a couple of hundred years, but the point is that the picture has a viewpoint which is not always seen or recorded.

But rotate the picture 180 degrees and Bunyip, the river monster is revealed, incorporating 60,000+ years of Australian Aboriginal culture and legend. Or maybe it’s just a really ugly fish, or the exoskeleton of a giant insect. Can I get the culture and the legend and the ugly and the exoskeleton into a textile? I’m gonna try, but it won’t be perfect.

Finally, this badly focused picture was taken with one of those little spy cameras that you can stick under a door and check out what the nasty neighbors are doing. The camera is on a stalk and you can bend it to look around corners. Unfortunately, I took the picture while the camera was down inside our bedroom wall. That prehistoric looking shape is the remains of our timber stud wall and probably the framing for the shower in the adjacent bathroom. So, there is lots of imperfection in there to be dealt with, but the shapes are very inspirational. I’m going to EMBRACE the IMPERFECTION that is APPARENT here, and then the BUILDER is coming to REPLACE the IMPERFECTION before the house FALLS DOWN. I may get a textile representation done before it is perfect again.