Valerie Hearder on the art and soul of quilting

Africa Nova

Textured Tuesdays: I'm just back from South Africa and I have so many fabulous textured images to share!This display was at a wonderful gallery shop called Africa Nova in Cape Town. Telephone wire baskets along with ceramics, beaded dolls and the traditional circular red hats worn by married Zulu women. African icons from Ethiopia and beaded giraffe from Zululand.

San Rock Paintings

Last week we spent our final days in South Africa tucked into a quiet valley near Clanwilliam in the Cederberg Mountains in the Cape. It was a short holiday after leading our 22 day tour. We stayed in a 250 year old classic Cape Dutch converted barn in a citrus orchard. Perfectly quiet, sunshiny days with black velvet nights sprinkled vividly with southern constellations were just what we needed. Clanwilliam is centre of rooibos tea production - it can only grow in this small region of the Cape. I bought a kilogram to bring home.

We spent a day exploring one of the 3,000 San rock painting sites in the Cederberg. The paintings go back at least 8,000 years and evidence is that these small, gentle people lived here for over 100,000 years. I found this wonderful little video about their click language. The San were beaten almost to extinction within 200 years of the Nguni tribes migrating from the north and the Europeans settling the Cape as a water station en route for spices in the East. However San genes are strongly present in the local populace and their cousins, the Khoisan/Bushmen, have been pushed deep into the driest places in Africa: Botswana, Namibia and the Kalahari Desert.


The San left their mark in these fascinating, vulnerable paintings. Priceless treasures, they are our earliest human art and speak of a cohesive culture connected to nature. Many of the paintings are fading due to lichens, weathering time and sometimes senseless vandalism. I found it profoundly moving.

Coincidentally, after viewing the paintings I read an article about how an exploration company wants to frack the remote desert areas where the Khoisan eek out a fragile existence in Botswana. They are to be displaced yet again. Heartbreaking.

The day we die
a soft wind will blow away our footprints in the sand.
When the wind has gone,
who will tell the timelessness
that once we walked this way in the dawn of time?
- from an old song of the San.

In this image a newborn zebra teeters on its wobbly legs. Keenly observed and captured in ocher by a San artist on the rock walls of the Cederberg.

Our accommodations near Clanwilliam. It is said the San taught new comers how to drink rooibos tea.

Telephone Wire Basket

Textured Tuesdays: We saw this large telephone wire basket at the African Art Centre in Durban, South Africa. Vibrant colour  and free form weaving.

Embroidery Bearing Witness

On September 7th, a fascinating exhibition of South African embroideries will open at the Fowler Museum at UCLA, Los Angeles.  It's called, Bearing Witness: Embroidery as History in Post-Apartheid South Africa It will feature the work of two groups that I've been closely connected to over the past 10 years through my fair trade imports, African Threads and my cultural tours to South Africa.

The Mapula (means Mother of Rain) Embroidery group is from the Winterveld and Kaross , the other group, is from Limpopo Province South Africa. Both groups are featured in the Fowler show. William Worger, who collected most of the pieces for this exhbition, is giving a talk on October 16 at the Fowler, if you're lucky enough to be close by to take it in. Bill is a professor of African history at UCLA.

We'll be visiting both these textile groups (among others) on my tour to South Africa next April. Learn more about this special arts, culture and textile tour here. Here, Bertha and Pinky Resenga hold a Mapula embroidery about community health and water safety, taken when I visited this group about 6 years ago.

This last piece is from the Kaross Group in Limpopo. It is a large embroidered tapesty of the Rain Queen and is part of my collection. Drop me a line if your interested in acquiring any hangings.

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Kaross Embroidery

November Retreat

November now, and it's growing cold. It's also the busiest time of year for me as I prepare for my annual African Threads Christmas Sale.  In the midst of the rush I took four days to go on retreat with some dear friends.  We did drawing exercises, discussed our work, stitched and talked art for four days.

We walked each day in the natural beauty of of the Bay of Fundy and Annapolis Basin. Looking at nature's mark-making in twiggy bushes and bleached branches. Each of us noting how lovely they would look stitched. Breathing salty air, enjoying each mindful moment.

 

We stayed up way too late each night, not wanting to miss a word or waste a drop of our precious moments together.

My cup runneth over. Thank you Penny,  Margi and Judy. wise, dear freinds.