tACTile @ CQ Evening Meeting: 5 February 2009

The first evening meeting for 2009 is set for Thursday, 5 February, 7.15 for 7.45-10pm. Please join us for a full and inspirational program including:

• accredited teachers decribing their forthcoming workshops;
• a special show and tell with the theme of "Summer Quilts" or "What I did in the Holidays"; and
• a presentation by tACTile sharing their latest exhibition of contemporary quilts - Collections - which will open in February 2009 at the Australian Quilt Convention in Melbourne.

Passions by Beth & Trevor Reid (see My Place Quilts)

tACTile was founded at the end of 2001 by a group of Canberra based textile artists to advance contemporary quiltmaking in Australia by exploring the opportunities of the art quilt. tACTile comprises 6 members; Jenny Bowker, Dianne Firth, Helen Gray and Beth Miller with Beth and Trevor Reid working together in partnership. All the artists are individually acknowledged as leaders in the field of contemporary quiltmaking at local, national and international levels. The name tACTile was chosen to allude to the touch of textiles while incorporating the fact that they all live in the ACT (Australian Capital Territory). The group has toured nationally and internationally three very successful exhibitions, ‘Pathways’ 2003-2004, ‘Five Squared’ 2005-2007 and ‘Eyeline’ 2007-2008 and are now in the process of completing their fourth exhibition ‘Collections’.

Collection (noun)

• The action or process of collecting
• A group of things collected or accumulated, Collectable (Adj)
• Worth collecting
• Able to be collected, Collective (Adj)
• Done by or belonging to all the members of a group.

The exhibition brief was for each artist to construct a number of quilts to fit within a defined area on the theme 'Collections', it could be a literal interpretation of a personal collection or whatever an individual sees as a collection. As in other tACTile exhibitions there will be a collaborative component to this exhibition. We are all collectors of something, look around and see how many collections surround you, it may be shoes, plants in the garden, books, buttons, rusty bottle tops, nails or a collection of interesting shapes, when two or more like objects are grouped together a collection begins.