The quilt is different from all the others. Where the colourwash quilts move and pulse with landscape impressions — teabags arranged into mountains, oceans, gardens, skies — March is still. Calm and circular. Concentric rings of natural teabags arranged from light to dark, a composition that resembles a rose window in a cathedral. No place depicted. No season. No specific memory. Just the warm vellum tones of the teabag in its purest form, held in a pattern that suggests something sacred.
My family: my sacred place of belonging.
March: Ingci
The elephant is growing bigger, the name of the month means a large elephant.
At the centre of those rings are four colourwash squares: Colin, Lisha, Jake, and me. My innermost circle. The place where I belong most completely and most vulnerably, in equal measure.
I need to be honest about what making this series cost.
Completing a master’s in my fifties, while working full-time as a teacher, is not something that happens without something else giving way. I could not cut time from my work life, so it was family time that I sacrificed — evenings in the studio when I should have been on the veranda, weekends lost to writing when my children were in their last years at home before leaving. I was often criticised for it. I often felt the tension of doing too much, of being, as it was put to me, too selfish. These were not easy years. My marriage suffered. There were times I wanted to throw in the towel — not on the marriage, but on the master’s, particularly when it dragged on yet another year. We were all tired. Relationships were fragile.
Colin had long given up interest in my work by the time I made March. Or perhaps I had stopped showing him, for fear of the criticism.
One afternoon, towards the end, I asked him to sit with me on the veranda.
I asked him to create the teabag squares that would represent the four of us. We sat together in the late afternoon light, drank a cup of tea, and talked. He worked on the squares beside me. It felt like fragile threads were stitching the quilt and our relationship back together, carefully, at the same time.
The three quilts that open the series — January, February, March — were not planned as a triptych. I made January and February as a diptych, and only understood the full shape of the three when I completed March last of all. Together they tell a beginning, middle, and end: enfoldment, the wrenching discomfort of not belonging, and finally — after all the months of work, all the teabags, all the winters and birthdays and losses and rests — the distilled answer.
Faith. Family. The sacred, quiet circle of those you hold dear.
