installation of earth ark

Earth Ark, recycled linen damask table cloths and women's handkerchiefs, silk, cotton and ash leaf, hand embroidered, hand quilted, 88" square, 2011. The weight of this piece is heavier than a usual quilt, and so I stitched a canvas sleeve for hanging purposes across the top edge. We have invented a way to hang it so that there is no pulling on the front of the quilt. It will hang 5 inches out from the wall. Ned and I installed Earth Ark in the Little Current United Church yesterday. The hanging device involves four brackets and two wooden bars as well as the sleeve. Ned figured out the how of it.

OK, it's his invention. It went up easily. The only thing that was un-nerving is the height of the ladder. Because of the pews being attached to the floor, we couldn't open the ladder all the way, and it was hard to move around.


I did climb up to sew the ash leaf on, but it was just too scary to try to stitch in that awkward position 12 feet up in the air. My man came through for me again.

Thanks Ned.

And thank you so much to all the volunteer participants who helped to create this work of art.

I will be making a photo presentation of the making of this panel on Sunday Oct 30 during the church service which will be repeated on November 10 during the regular circle project Thursday at 2 pm.

letting the hand lead

For my degree, I have to defend my exhibition work with external examiners. The exam is called a Viva. In the UK, art is very bound up in theory and it's a little ironic that I studied so many Japanese artists for my dissertation. The Japanese do not seem to theorize so much about what they do, but follow their materials and hone their own techniques. In this way, I think that the Japanese are more phenomenological. They let their hands lead rather than their minds. In my own work, I am finding that when I leave the theory at home with the books and go into the studio and just work, I usually find better and more answers then when I start the other way around. (with the theory) Sometimes when I stay home and read theory, I end up mending Ned's jeans and baking brownies.

connected to the body

tablecloth, dyed red with procion, then overdyed with blackberry, then devore process to make a grid of holes empty spaces, lace, absence, loss, mortality

Cloth is like the human body. It holds memories and dreams at the same time. It wears out.

cloth

silk organza coloured with hawberry above, blueberry below a layer of organza coloured with cone flower stems, leaves and flowers plus iron silk-wool gauze coloured with blackberry bramble, goldenrod, sumac, blueberry, hawthorn, and blackberry/iron nine square feet of silk-wool gauze, willow on top, rudbeckia/iron below this is hemp, previously coloured with encaustic. It was simmered in an alum solution with other coloured fabrics and received their colour beautifully.

I have quite a lot of naturally dyed fabrics, now to listen to them.

there is a secret core in everyone

every spoken word is a covering for the inner self

stop the words now
open the window in the center of your chest and let the birds fly in and out


Rumi

energy cloth

Juried into Ontario Craft '11. Energy Cloth, hand stitch, wax resist, old cotton bed sheet, 160 cm x 160 cm or 58 inches square, 2011 I am pleased that my work is part of this juried exhibition. The show will be on display in the Ontario Craft Council gallery on Queen Street in Toronto from Nov 24 until Dec 30.
Quilt maker Joyce Seagram has a piece selected for the exhibition as does knitter/sculptor Tracey Martin. Otherwise, the jurors did not select many textile pieces. I only count six out of thirty five. Click here to see the entire list of artists selected.

November trees

On our drive home across Ontario, I photographed some November trees, branches suddenly evident. These are from the Manilla area, taken from the car. It's good to be home. My stack of books was waiting.

The quilt that covers the sleeping body takes on that energy, like an imprint, like a memory. Jane Whiteley

Dots like this

I've been quilting. Jack turned two years last week, and this is his quilt. us

xx

April's show

vintage doilies the artist's hand cast in resin a hand made indigo dyed quilt a moon cut from steel a dream boat the artist

For the Belgo report about her exhibit click here

My big idea

My big idea is to give enough information for my viewer to enter their own re-discovered inner world, but not too much.
Not too much information. The viewer needs to discover it.
I also want to remind the viewer that life is short, art is long.
A wabi sabi kind of thing. I want the work to hold its own destruction,
but the holding, the touching,
the idea of nurturance and
reparation
will also be present.
It's almost a spiritual thing. A belief.
A faith.
That we will go on.
Not knowing what lies ahead, we do go on.

Trunk Show #3: Calendar

February family photos, lace, wool, corduroy, acrylic paint, ribbon, buttons. about 27" square 1988-89June family photos, dyed cotton organdy, thread, about 25" square 1988-89 September family photos, pages from nursery rhyme books, cotton, thread, about 32" square 1988-89 December family photos, christmas cards, wool, taffeta, pine cones, embroidery thread, beads, about 28" x 26" 1988-89

Calendar Series

For one year, just after our youngest was born, I had doubles made of all the photographs I took of our kids just being themselves. Then I made a wall piece for each month using those doubles as a starting point. I used seasonally appropriate fabrics for each month. June is a single layer of dyed organdy, light as air, blue as a summer sky.
These are drugstore processed snapshots. Not digital images, not photo transfers.
Oona was 10. Above she is shown with Grace, age 3. (detail of December) Jay was 8. (detail of September) Grace (detail of February April was only one year old then. (detail of June)

Motherhood consumed me throughout the 80’s and 90’s. In 1983 we had moved from Thunder Bay where Ned and I had a Finnish farm to the paper mill town of Kenora in NorthWestern Ontario. The older two children were born in Thunder Bay, the younger two in Kenora.

There are twelve of these, one for each month but I only took these four to the September trunk show in Toronto. It's interesting to me, that even then, I was obsessed with documenting the swift passage of time. It's especially evident with young children - they grow up so very fast.