Packing for Cuba

Ned and I are leaving for a week in Cuba tomorrow. I've decided to take along a stitch project that can be done in my lap anywhere (including the beach). It's another old project that seems a shame not to finish. A large embroidered floral medallion surrounded by a wide border of tiny hand-pieced triangles - all overdyed black. I'll miss the birds and I suppose they'll miss me too.

I use a hoop

I often get asked when I find the time to do all the stitching. It's discipline really, and also a treat for me. I stitch every evening for two or three hours, and again every morning for one hour. I use a hoop. I love the meditative productivity.



Detail of linen work with stem and kantha stitch. The wool quilt is 90" x 90". The linen piece is 60" x 28". These large pieces eventually get finished over time.

the retreat quilt

I spent another four hours in my lovely studio today cutting up one of the large collages on canvas that I've been working on there and re-arranging the pieces. The effort was unsuccessful and it's depressing because I wonder if I've wasted rare and precious studio time over the last two months on these four messy pieces.

No wonder I try to find an hour each morning to retreat into 'power and beauty', the quilt pictured above and just hand stitch.

Notes re: Judy Chicago

I bought little notebooks for each of us at the nearest Shopper's Drug Mart before the lecture last Thursday. I like to scratch a few words to help me remember. Allyson Mitchell, the very intelligent, ambitious (and young) curator of "When Women Rule the World: Judy Chicago and Stitch" and its companion show "She will always be younger than us" moderated the panel. Allyson said: "Feminism is always as young as its youngest enthusiasts".

Jenni Sorkin spoke next and reminded us that Judy Chicago had worked in opposition to the current feminist themes of her time like performance and video, choosing instead monumental projects like 'the dinner party' and 'the birth project'. As well, Jenni raised the question of the marginalization of fibre art. With slides she showed that at the same time as the break through feminist collaboration 'Woman House' there was an exhibit of vibrant fibre art taking place nearly next door that has not been remembered in art history, not even feminist art history. Why?

Maura Reilly, respected New York curator and writer about women's art said that she was 'tear-jerked' when she saw the stitched pieces in the two exhibits at the textile museum. She said that she had never seen them together like this before and that the sheer amount of work as well as it's haptic quality affected her greatly.
(Maura Reilly is responsible for finally getting The Dinner Party a permanent home in the Brooklyn Museum in New york and is thus very familiar with Judy Chicago's work.)

When Judy Chicago finally rose to speak she answered Allyson's comment about the monumentality of her work by saying that she opposes ephemeral art by women because it just continues the process of erasure of women artists. Even worse, the women do it to themselves. She had found out that art institutions didn't want to exhibit women's work when she had so much trouble exhibiting 'the dinner party' and 'the birth project'.

Family and Art

I've returned from a most wonderful weekend in Toronto during which I spent intensive time with our two youngest daughters. The girls and I went to at least fifteen galleries together and enjoyed the art and the companionship. We were also able to have dinners with a set of old friends and with Jay and Erika.
Which art galleries did we hit?
Textile Museum of Canada
The Power Plant
York Quay Gallery
Loop
Lennox
Edward Day
David Kaye
Stephen Bulger
MOCCA (pictured above)
Art Gallery of Ontario
The impetus for this date with my daughters was the Judy Chicago lecture last Thursday. It was very inspiring. Maura Reily, Jenni Sorkin and Allyson Mitchell were also on the panel. Insights to Judy Chicago's long career plus inspiration for young feminist artists (and dinner conversation) filled that evening.
My absolute favourite gallery was the new Art Gallery of Ontario however. Not only is the building absolutely gorgeous, but all of the artwork has been rehung in revisionist and thought provoking ways. Very excellent.

Heart and Soul

My piano students and I played Heart and Soul today. The music drew other kids in from the hall (I teach in a school library) and one (not a student) played the duet with me. Music and hearts - well what can I say. They speak. Don't worry so much I tell myself. Visit this blog "Jump for art" and be cheered up.

hearts

Why not?

I've been able to stitch into this linen piece in the evenings.

People ask me why am I taking this second fine arts degree? It takes so much of my time, shouldn't I stop procrastinating and get on with my own work? I'm studying 20th and 21st century visual art this winter and have not been able to do much of anything else art-wise, especially this last month.



Why am I doing this?
Well, Why not?

Ten Titles

Hold Me
Today, Yesterday, Tomorrow
In The Center of the Body is the Soul
Cry Me a River
Flesh and Blood
Each Stitch is a Prayer
Fragile as a Leaf in Autumn
The Rescuer
Don’t Go Crazy
Love Never Dies
Ten (of thirty) titles of quilts and cloth books that were in the 'My Hand Sings Red' exhibition in Thunder Bay a hundred years ago in 2004.

Ann Hamilton

Malediction - Ann Hamilton

Ann Hamilton made social comments without saying a word. In ‘Malediction’ (1992), a woman repeatedly tore a piece of bread dough from a large bowl, bit it, pressed it into her palette with her fingers, and then set it down in a pile of hundreds of others in a large wicker coffer. She sat facing a wall heaped to the ceiling with laundered sheets. It was a disturbing testament to women’s silent history.

Malediction - Ann Hamilton

Robert Rauschenberg

Blue Urchin (Hoarfrost) - Robert Rauschenberg

Textile artists continue to be inspired by Robert Rauschenberg’s radical use of cloth. The Hoarfrost series that he made in 1974 was very well received by the critics of the time. In them he used a variety of transparent, translucent and opaque fabrics ranging from humble cotton cheesecloth to exotic satin and silk on which he printed text and images from newspapers and magazines.

Displayed by pinning the fabrics directly to the wall at their top corners, the stress lines of the hanging soft material become part of the composition.

Louise Bourgeois

Femmes Maison - Louise Bourgois

At the age of 40, Louise Bourgeois, a wife and mother of three young boys, exhibited a group of painted abstract wooden figures in a gallery in New York. One of them, ‘Sleeping Figure’, was purchased by the Museum of Modern Art.
She was part of that post war generation of women written about by the early feminists Simone de Bouvoir and Betty Friedan. One of those women who, because of the current ideals of post war America, probably experienced some of “the yearning that women suffered in the middle of the 20th century in the U.S. …afraid to ask even of herself, the silent question, ‘is this all?’

Don't Abandon Me - Louise Bourgois

Because of her challenge to the status quo of society in general in the late 40’s and 50’s and to the masculine ethos of modernism, Louise Bourgeois’ work was looked at with renewed interest by the feminist movement in the early 1970’s and
1980’s. Lucy Lippard, the renowned feminist art critic wrote about her “Rarely has an abstract art been so directly and honestly informed by its maker’s psyche. It can’t be categorised. Can’t be art historicised”.

Over her 70 year career she has not had a signature material, but has experimented with a wide variety and managed to remain ‘contemporary’ for three separate generations. She turns 98 this year and although she is an undeniable influence on younger women artists she remains famously neurotic.

“Art is the guarantee of sanity” is her mantra.

Other Ways of Knowing

My thesis:

In all of the literature about modern aesthetics and art history, sight has been privileged over all the other senses. Artists practising in the last half of the 20th century challenged this with other ways of knowing.