This series ’Garden of Hope’ explores grief not as something that changes us, but as something that transforms us. Within sadness, moments of beauty and light still appear — quiet reminders that joy and sorrow are not opposites, but companions. It is possible to laugh and ache, to miss deeply and still remain present.

Hope is a journey and a conscious choice — to move toward it, to tend grief until it softens into something meaningful and calm, something that can be carried. Hope opens space for what may still unfold in beautiful ways. Even a bruised heart remembers how to hope.

This series, like much of my work, holds a silent story – the layers beneath smiles, adventures, and beauty that often go unseen. It speaks to being whole and broken at the same time, allowing gratitude and sadness to coexist, and to the gentle, gradual return of warmth after the storm.

Whilst making this triptych, I was processing grief, as seems to be the way with a few of my quilts. I thought, right, this is the last quilt about grief. I was conscious, once again about the time constraints I had to get a body of work ready for our biennial COOTS exhibition.

I normally make my own dyed/printed fabric for my work but the timing was too tight and all my wet studio materials were still packed in boxes. Then I spied a piece of fabric from Mallee Textiles (the black and silver fabric as the background on the first piece) and I thought, yes I don’t have to do my own I can start with that. So off I went. This triptych took months of work and at times I was unsure as whether I even liked it, as you go through the creative process and have those highs and lows and moments of indecision and doubt.

I went through a lot of different backgrounds, foregrounds, figures and auditioning of fabrics before deciding on the final colours

Garden of Hope is currently hanging at our COOTS exhibition; ‘A Common Thread’ at the Lakes District Museum and Gallery in Arrowtown.

I was so surprised and humbled that on the first day of our exhibition my Garden Of Hope triptych sold to someone who connected with it and loved it as much as I did. So I asked the new owners if I could borrow it back to enter into our National quilt symposium exhibition later this year and they generously consented. So if you don’t see it in Arrowtown, you may see it in Christchurch at the ‘Threads of Our Time’ exhibition at Burnside High School from October 1-6.

It seems I am not quite done with death processing quilts yet, a week after our exhibition opened and this quilt sold, my mother passed away – hmm maybe another quilt in this series is in my future!