Absolutely Mysterious

I lay the completed 'mended planet' circle on the grass below our deck yesterday so that I could photograph it from above. The background is not pieced yet, what is seen in the photo is the cotton lawn foundation fabric. It looks so ethereal, magical, elsewhere.

Liturgical art helps us observe ritual.
Why do we need ritual?

To celebrate life passages. Birth. Death Marriage
To honour daily rituals. waking. eating. loving
To address what we don't know. spiritual things
And what we are anxious about. fear

National Conference

hand quilted table cloth damask
I will be speaking about the Circle Project on Thursday and I don't understand why I am losing sleep over this. These meditation panels are contemporary, spiritual, larger than life, slow, ecological, earthy, ..all that. Still, I am shaky about sharing this unfinished body of work and dread having to defend it. It's not what is expected in liturgical textiles. removing foundation fabric from 'mended planet'

Along with the digital presentation there will be some hands on stitching. There is no room where I present for the quilt on its frame. I need to prepare for working on the third panel, perhaps sooner than I would have. Maybe that's good.

Here's the link to the conference if you are interested. Worship Matters

couched linen on linen with velvet applique. I'm not sure about that applique.

from the past

Storm at Sea quilt, made in 1982

The following journal text was written in 1998

April and I have gone swimming twice today. The first time the sky and the water were the exact same colour, wonderful hazy blues that melted together. Swimming in that blue made me feel like an angel. Flying slowly, calmly.Now at 4:00 pm the clouds over Killarny have a pink tinge and the sky is slightly lighter, perhaps a purer blue than the water.
April in her shocking pink bathing suit made a beautiful contrast and the clouds looked as if they were reflecting her beauty. I wished I had a camera when I treaded water below her, she on the swimming dock, bending over the ladder, the reflections of the water flickering over her. Surrounded by blue sky with no horizon.

April wasn't even born when this quilt was made.

metaphysics of the ordinary

"Avoid the use of unnecessary notes" Jean Sibelius, (Finland) "When I take everything away, I have the feeling that I can find a place of repose and I can absorb the universe within me" Tetsuo Fujimoto (Japan) "I tell you, the more I think, the more I feel, that there is nothing more truly artistic than to love people." Vincent Van Gogh

emily and hildegarde

Moisture and Greenness on top, Emily Carr Visited Me underneath

This morning I pack up two old favourites to send off to Huntsville, Ontario where they will be part of a show of contemporary Canadian quilts. As I was folding them, I noticed their reverse sides. Quilt backs are just not appreciated when hung flat to the wall in a gallery, and so here is some time in the sun for Emily Carr Visited Me's back - filled with embroidery floss
and for Moisture and Greenness's wonderfully mottled dyed linen and her secret heart.The title for Moisture and Greenness comes from something I read long ago by the medieval mystic, Hildegarde of Bingen. "All the world really needs is moisture and greenness". For the front of this quilt, click here. What look like multi coloured running stitches are really the reverse side of blanket stitching that covers the painted surface of Emily Carr Visited Me. They also act as quilting stitches. If you want to see the front, click here. The backs of quilts are unappreciated treasures. Watch anyone unfold a quilt, and see how they immediately exclaim about the back. Also, the back of a quilt is what we feel when the quilt is covering us.

Heart to Heart, on display currently in the juried exhibition Fibreworks, has a meaningful back. You can't see it if you go to Cambridge, but I have posted a photo in my updates. Click here to see it.

fire

I re-discovered something wonderful over the weekend. Everyone knows it, but we forget.
It is that we are small. We are little. Part of a huge continuum of connections between generations and with nature. The cottage is nearly a hundred years old, in Ned's family for generations. I remember so many things that happened there, he remembers more, but the place remembers the most. Looking up. Looking down. The spiritual feeling on that island warmed me even more than the fires did. I am not succeding at communicating the enormous sense of peace and happiness that filled me the whole weekend, but it seems urgent that I try. Solitude and quietness and closeness to nature, those things nurture us all, I am convinced. Maybe this is why I make quilts. They will outlast me.

and what you do not know is the only thing you know

Open Heart, encaustic on paper, thread on silk

The text is from East Coker by T.S. Eliot.

You say I am repeating
Something I have said before. I shall say it again.
Shall I say it again? In order to arrive there,
To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,
You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.
In order to arrive at what you do not know
You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
In order to possess what you do not possess
You must go by the way of dispossession.
In order to arrive at what you are not
You must go through the way in which you are not.
And what you do not know is the only thing you know
And what you own is what you do not own
And where you are is where you are not.

The complete poem is here. I read this verse as advice about how to be an artist (and a human). How scary it is to do things that one really wants to do, rather than fall back on what one knows how to do already.

This piece sold through the Perivale in August.

Jeana Marie has stretched her hand out to me from Australia. I stretch mine back to her with an open heart. You've gotta be in awe of it, the power of the internet.

Repetition

repetition, reproduction, duplication, reduplication, redoubling, recurrence, reaffirmation, redundancy, tautology, tautophany, reoccurance, recapitulation, reiteration, restatement, review, rehash, reassert, repetitious, pitter patter, repeat, repetitiveness, monotony, monotone, duplicate, chorus, reproduce, tedium, humdrum, ding dong, sing song, reduplicate, double, ditto, come again, repeat oneself, retell, restate, run over again, do it again, never hear the last of it, go over and over, elaborate, repeat, recur, reoccur, often, frequently, time after time, times without number, year after year, day after day, many times, recurrent, returning, reappearing, ever recurring, thick coming, frequent, incessant, a number of times, returning, reappearing, twice more, ditto, once more, encore.


Text is from an art piece Mel Bochner made in 1966 called
Repetition: Portrait of Robert Smithson, Ink on graph paper.

Cloth is cotton dyed with procion that I am using for a quilt back.

old cloth plus time

Yesterday I couched strips of donated linen damask napkins to old linen tablecloths. This is for the THIRD meditation panel.

Brownies meet on Monday evenings, so Earth Ark was propped against a wall out of the way. I had planned to quilt on it in the morning for a few hours by myself, but did the embroidery instead. I've been preoccupied with family for much of August and want to thank those who kept the project going. Much was accomplished. Judy Larimer did most of the chain stitch quilting seen in this detail.

report re fibreworks

Maria Chronopoulos, Forget Me Not 2010 (object one)
hair, wire, branches, glass, wax Maria Chronopoulous, Forget Me Not 2010 (object two) the flowers were created with white synthetic hair and silver wire

I don't usually like group exhibitions, but fibreworks 2010 is really very fine. The 38 pieces work well together even though they were created by 28 very different artists from all over the country. Ann Marie Hadcock Para Red 2009 wire, yarn, fibre, plastic support Noelle Hamlyn Traces 2010 Free motion embroidery detail of Traces. Noelle Hamlyn received a mention from the jurors for this piece. Anna Wieselgren (dis) location , ongoing
used bed sheets from a refugee centre for Tibetans in New Delhi. Larger than it looks in this photo, this installation was a 'sea of blue balls rolling around with no specific place' Heidi Overhill The Love Socks of J. Alfred Prufrock, 2004 - 2010. Wool and needles, text by T.S. Eliot Heidi Overhill received a mention from the jurors for this piece. Valerie Knapp Trunk Diptych 2009 Embroidery, drawing, thread, paper Valerie Knapp, Eye Pod Diptych 2009 Embroidery, drawing, thread, paper
Eleanor Hannan Portraits of Forgiveness series 2009
disperse dye, paper applique, machine embroidery on polyester.
Sara Alford Remember the Seed germ 2010 Transparent lace like fabric made with hot glue (detail shown) Sara Alford Remember the Seed Germ 2010 hot glue. Notice how big the complete work is. (That's Ned standing in front of it)

Juror Catherine Heard mentioned that the high level of skill in a variety of specialized techniques was notable in this exhibition. She also emphasized that each piece related to the world in a poetic way. The amount of thought and the care taken by each artist made the entire exhibition remarkable.
Our daughter Grace is completing her masters of science at near-by University of Waterloo, and I'm so glad that she was able to attend. This is her with my hand stitched piece, Heart to Heart.

Fibreworks 2010 Biennial of Contemporary Canadian Fibre Art continues until October 31 at the Cambridge Gallery.

wolfe island and cloth

We went on the ferry. Dad's van is adapted for his wheel chair.I'll be bringing my mother's manuscript home, that novel she left behind. "The social metaphor that cloth offers up is incredible. Each thread is visible and necessary." Ann Hamilton "I am not ashamed of my helplessness" Louise Bourgeois