Sarah Louise Ricketts

Detail scraper

I am a fringe dweller, like most Australians. We hug the coast, living for the summer and the glow of the beach, the glint of sun on the surf's glass. I live on the urban fringe of the City of Melbourne, pulled by the excitement of people, the bright lights and energy of the crowd. Four million of us, seemingly huddling together against the vast red emptiness at our backs.

Like many Australians, I seldom see the real bones of the landscape of my country. Sometimes, perhaps, from the window of a car or a plane or on the screen of movie. Only very rarely do I look at it with my own eyes. And yet, like most Australians, I am filled with great love for this place. It is a love carried within, a part of us.

When I returned to live in the land of my birth, I understood that attachment to place – my profound love for the curving creek bed, the tree branch angled in welcome, the insolence of mountains – was part of me, no matter where I lived. I carried the hard-won love of the southern land within me to the Middle East and thence to the northern land of my birth. It informs all my work.

Statements about the Work for “Telling Stories”

For “Telling Stories,” I have selected work inspired by a crazy mountain-top race against time and nature through Jordan in the snow with my partner, Geoff Hicks, in 2007; one of my favourite memories of our life together. Geoff lived fast and died young - in 2009. We were building in Carlton at that time. I completed the works, incorporating a roof terrace from which the lights and skyscrapers (to use a now-antiquated but still marvellous term) of Melbourne can be touched. The second piece tells the story of this other life, lived in the realized architecture of a shared dream.

HOLY LAND: SNOW IN PETRA

Hand - stitched painted & felted fabric, deconstructed, reconstructed; coton, wool, silks
156 cm h  x 108 cm w

2007




Sketches, memories and photographs of a too brief but nonetheless compelling tour of Jordan provided the impetus for this work. 

Geoff and I drove to Petra along the mountain spine of the country, in January 2007, with snow dashing about the car and drifts pushed up into formidable banks, where snow had not been in recent memory. The road to Petra was closed behind us as night fell. We made a carefully mad dash toward the town.  The urge to celebrate this experience and to capture something of the haunting spiritual nature of the landscape proved irresistible. 

It is painted cotton wholecloth, felted, dissected and reassembled, stitched, refelted, repainted and assembled onto silk organza ground and frame.

This piece toured the US in 2010, as part of the World of Quilts competition and exhibition series.

detail Holy Land :Snow in Petra

SCRAPER

Nunofelted Fabrics; Hand-Stitching, Machine-Stitched, Silk Organza, Silk Tops, Fleece, Wool Yarns
140 cm h  x 105 cm w

2014

             THE STORY

When the boys and I first moved to Carlton, just on the edge of the city, there was nothing to the immediate south of us.  It did not take very long for a new apartment block to begin its rapid climb to soaring heights, changing our view from flat open blue to the many facets of golden windows.  

At first, I was quite resentful of this looming presence, whose appearance was unwelcome.  However, since it has been inhabited, the building has become some of a friend, a curious companion in the middle of the night when I look up and wonder whose windows are those, and why are they still up?

Surprisingly beautiful arrangements of light and colour are brought about by the random activity of human beings, giving the building life and filling me with a surreptitious delight.  The unwelcome intruder is an unexpected gift.

Detail Scraper