I'm quite interested in the notion of decorative art and how quite a lot, it would seem to me as an sort of art outsider, quite a lot of works by women are kind of relegated, I suppose, to decorative art. But they seem to me, when I looked at the Westbury quilt, I thought to myself, this is so much better or so much more–better is not the word–so much more important than a piece of decoration.
It was created by these women, the Misses Hampsons, who were sisters and they put a lot of stories about their life in Westbury, in Tasmania. There's quite a lot of little aphorisms like: 'time waits for no man', 'faith, hope and charity' which are all in these little panels around and I love that.
It was so dense with meaning, it had to be more than a quilt. Actually with my friend Katie B Plumber, this artist who's so wonderful, Katie was saying, oh, it's so interesting with that piece because it's a very special thing, clearly, to the women who made it. It's as if they said, here's a quilt and isn't it lovely? But oh, don't use it as a quilt. We're gonna fold it up carefully in tissue paper, and then we're gonna put it in this beautiful camphor wood chest, and then we're gonna lock it. And you must never look at it or use it for the purpose that ostensibly it should be used, as a bed covering.
There's quite a lot of textile art and decorative arts that are kind of separated from their use, but, we don't know why they were made–It's sort of interesting. I wrote all the lyrics for The Westbury Quilt except, well, I wrote the outside verses, lyrics, but quite a lot of the text I took directly from the quilt, so it's just lifted and sung by the Luminescence Chamber Singers who coloured it so beautifully. I couldn't have wished for more as a composer.
