A picture of two tīeke in a titoki tree looks like a detailed painting, but Susan Devonshire has created it with fabric which is why she refers to her art as ‘painting’ with fabric.
Her work is not the usual patchwork quilting because it is not exactly patchwork, but a detailed combination of fabric.
Among them are Canterbury scenes that capture the arable patchwork of paddocks, to layers of mountains and a braided river crossing the plains.
The details are accurate, she points out, to every peak, hill, farm and the flow of the river.
The tīeke, or saddlebacks, is one of her favourite creations over the years and she continues to piece together fabric with her sewing machine in her villa at the Arvida Oakwood’s retirement village.
“At school I was a bit hopeless at art, and the only one my teacher thought was any good I didn’t like and thought it was awful!”
She enjoyed sewing her own clothes though and years later the “accidental happenings” of two quilts using a “combination of applique” techniques occurred.
“When I paint, I put in too much detail and my husband would tell me to stop fiddling. When you ‘paint’ with fabric, you are obliged to simplify.”
What got her started was a banner she made for the Christchurch Cathedral in the 1980s, and one for Rural Women New Zealand.
After those works, people started asking her for them and she has been sewing pictures together ever since.
Many of them have dozens of different fabrics to make up the intricate landscapes and she says she enjoys solving the many problems that arise when trying to put them together to look realistic.
A wall-hanging in her home was made for her husband as his memory was fading, and picks out favourite aspects of his life to use as talking points and the detail makes locations easily identifiable.
The one she is working on now will be nikau palms along a Karamea road, leading into the Heaphy Track.ō
