A rolled-out length of plain white cloth is a blank canvas in the hands of Judy Hooworth.
With a mind full of densely detailed images gathered on her three extensive tours along the Silk Road last decade, Hooworth has spent the past two years seeking out tactile impressions that speak to thousands of years of cultural connections from China through the Middle East and Russia, and into Europe.
"I just made a whole lot of fabric based loosely on these images, trying to not replicate exactly what I'd seen but to express my feelings about it, about the colour and the patterns," she says.
"It's over the top and it's joyful, and I really like that."
There are "Chinese reds", "the blues of Uzbekistan", the vibrant colours of painted houses in Transylvania, linear marks carved in temple steps, tile patterns from the Mausoleum of the Fragrant Concubine in Kashgar, patterns gleaned from photographs she took of harvested corn drying in village squares, and scrawls of writing on walls that are used as community noticeboards.
"The mark that somebody has made, that fascinates," she says.
"With tiles you can have the same pattern done over and over again by different people and each tile is different.
"But they know the pattern from just doing it, it's ingrained.
"I like that individual mark, that little bit that says somebody was here doing this."
A selection of the art quilts that Hooworth has stitched from collaged parts of her painted, printed and dyed fabrics have formed into an exhibition being installed at Timeless Textiles Gallery in Newcastle East.
One work from the Silk Road series has already gained acclaim, chosen by international jury for Quilt National in the United States, which is the largest and one of the most prestigious contemporary quilt exhibits in the world.
You're only an outsider looking in . .
Hooworth has long been recognised in the highly competitive international art quilt field, mostly for her works based on Dora Creek, the waterway that runs nearby her studio at Lake Macquarie.
Last year alone she won two major awards in Australia for her Dora Creek series quilts, as well as picking up an award for surface design at the Quilts=Art=Quilts exhibition in New York State (with that piece selling into an American collection).
Her method of making her own fabric from a blank start began when she first moved to Morisset. Until her studio was built, there was no room for storing her large stash of commercial prints.
"That's when I started making white quilts and painting them," Hooworth says.
At first she painted the fabric from behind "so the paint started coming through the stitching lines".
Then she flipped her method, and starting painting the fronts of her quilts.
Moving from that to creating big pieces of fabric first, which she can cut up and collage, circled back to her quiltmaking roots making traditional patchwork (Hooworth and a friend ran a quilt commission enterprise in Sydney in the 1980s).
"I evolved back into making pieced quilts again," she says. Though, now her pieced quilts are to be hung as art, rather than used as bedding.
While Hooworth becomes immersed in the process of making "as much as the messaging", all of her art quilts are "about something".
Since her scholarship to the National Art School at 15 years of age, Hooworth has been attracted to history, finding the stories of art within. On one of her travels along a segment of the network of trading routes known as the Silk Road, Hooworth stood before an example of renowned Minoan 'octopus' pottery - a hand-painted vessel featuring octopuses with swirly tentacles.
"I just burst into tears, to actually see it in the flesh, this connection over 3000 years. It's quite a strange feeling, that sort of connection to what other people have made.
"You're only an outsider looking in, you can't ever be part of it. But you can look at it and say 'I can see where you are coming from with that'."
