Grow your own heart

How do you grow your own heart?

When we feel and support our own happiness, we are nourishing our ability to love.

You can't offer happiness to another until you have it youself.

Learn to love and heal yourself, then you have something to offer others.  

Thich Nhat Hanh

Images of one of the quilts I've been growing my heart with this summer.  In progress.

Joyce Wieland: I Love Canada ~ J'Aime Le Canada

 Joyce Wieland :  I Love Canada ~ J'Aime Le Canada

Joyce Wieland  (1930-1998) is considered to be one of Canada's most prominent and prolific artists. 

The youngest of three children, she was born in Toronto, Canada to English emigrants who died when Joyce was quite young.  Brought up by her siblings, she attended high school at Central Tech in Toronto and was mentored by artist Doris McCarthy, who taught there.  She began her work career in film animation and met artist Michael Snow, marrying him when she was 26.  In 1960, (age 30) and then again in 1962, she had solo shows in two separate Toronto commercial galleries.  1962 is also the year that she and Michael moved to New York and lived there for nine years.  While in the USA, she became more aware of politics and of her deep love for  her home country, Canada.  When Pierre Elliot Trudeau became prime minister in 1968, she celebrated that by giving him a bed sized quilt, inspired by his mantra, Reason Over Passion.  Read more information about this two part piece that mixes the personal and the political at this link.   Wieland and Snow moved back to Canada in 1971 in time for her to mount her solo exhibition, "True Patriot Love" at the National Gallery of Canada. The exhibition included quilts and paintings, most about the fragile arctic and expressing a deep love for Canada.  Joyce's older sister Joan Stewart along with friends and volunteers joined with Joyce to sew the quilts she designed for this ground-breaking exhibition.  

I Love Canada ~ J'Aime Le Canada    cloth, thread, batting, metal.  Joan Stewart did the quilting and the embroidery.        1970   collection of Mackenzie Art Gallery, Regina, Canada. 

"Wieland believed that Canada had to extricate itself from US encroachment.  Subverting the myth of a peaceful, tolerant, caring, and just Canada, the small embroidered letters in the middle read:  "Death to U.S. Technological Imperialism" in both official languages.   Wieland's progressive vision of Canadian society saw anglophones and francophones reconciled.  she declared in a 1971 New York Times article "I'm a Canadian.  I believe in Canada.  We should work for Canadian unity - English and French - as Canadians, not as anti-Americans.  We should be more positive about ourselves."

Joyce Wieland is being honoured by a full career retrospective in 2025.  It showed in Montreal in the first half of the year and in Toronto at the art gallery of Ontario in the second half.  There is a catalogue available entitled Heart On.  

Number 4 of Canadian Artists Who Work With Textiles  

Toronto visit

Tomorrow is Another Day, indigo in linen damask, applique, hand stitching, 2024

I’m in Toronto this week.  I arrived on Friday and spent  two nights (Friday and Saturday) at the Gladstone House on Queen West.  I was able to do this fancy thing because part of the Gladstone House Award that I won last fall was one night's sleep in the room where my work is hanging for one year.  (The second night was half price).  My linen wall piece will be in room 309 until November.  After those two nights, I moved to the east end of the city where my son lives with his family.   

Our daughter April lives in the west end of the city, and on that first Saturday she took me to several commercial galleries.  First up was the Patel Brown gallery where there was a group show What We Carry.  The handmade washi paper sculptures of Japanese-Canadian artist, Alexa Kumiko Hatanaka resonated with me.  She made sewn boulders and 3-dimensional wall pieces from lino block printed paper that she had made herself.   

At the same gallery, we saw some pieces by Swapnaa Tamhane 

Bird's Eye mirror embroidery on dyed silk by Swapnaa Tamhane

Fence watercolour on paper  by Swapnaa Tamhane

I feel so lucky to have been able to see these inspirational, quilt-like pieces that reference place (her ancestral homeland) so eloquently.  

We visited the Clint Roenisch gallery next and I saw Leif Low-Beer's solo exhibition of naive sculptures and paintings done in pastels and bright colours in a variety of mediums.  

S.E.T.M. 1 2025 

In the Daniel Faria gallery, Jean-Francois Lauda's solo exhibition,  Some Exceeding Twelve Minutes, was on display. All the paintings had this as their name, differentiated by a number. 

S.E.T.M. 5     2025

Jean-Francois Lauda is a practicing musician, and the title, Some Exceeding Twelve Minutes refers to the time that performances of musical pieces stretches to be longer than usual or expected.  I liked that time is considered a material in these paintings.  The artist says that he enjoys "staying with something long enough to understand what it's doing or undoing".  

I tried to understand why Lauda's work resonated with me so much, and I think it is because his paintings are similar to my own work (in textiles).  Like my work, his paintings a) are nearly monochromatic and b) there are large areas of 'empty space filled with textural marks".

Window   2017. Oil on canvas 

The last gallery that we visited on Saturday was MOCA - the Museum of Contemporary Art.  I had looked forward to viewing the solo shows of Jessica Stockholder and Justin Ming Yong, but was not as impressed as I had hoped to be by them.  However, Margaux Williamson's extensive exhibition entitled Shoes, books, hands, buildings and cars was really good. There were a lot of paintings, several of them dated 2025.  Most were very large.  On large neutral backgrounds, she represents the familiar interiors and backyards of her life in a diaristic way.  Her compositions explore abstraction, a variety of perspectives, unfinished areas, and contemporary dailiness.  

Red Carpet (collection of the art gallery of Ontario) 2024

I've followed Margaux Williamson's career for a while, beginning from when I read Sheila Heti’s 2010 novel grounded in their personal friendship, How Should a Person Be?   However, this is the first time that I have been able to view her paintings in real life and it was astounding to be face to face with her masterly technique and the large scale of the paintings.  

The final artist I will speak about is my grand daughter, Suvi, age 4.  She used finger paint on finger painting paper in these morning paintings about the sun, but (such a rebel) she used a paint brush to apply the paint.  (except for that red finger-painted circle in the painting on the upper left.)    

Being present

 June 18:  The day we drive to Ottawa and begin the wedding.

June 23:  The wedding was a big success.  We leave for Puckwana today.  I couldn't find the card I wanted to give to Grace so I wrote a long letter to her instead.

June 24:  We are at the cottage and the sound of lapping water and bird song are loud.  Just us and the Alaska family here for a few days.  

June 25:  I played Racko last night with Ned and the two boys and won.  Maybe I'll try to let others win that game next time.  Ha ha.

June 26:  Rachel Cusk felt that she had entered another world in her book about being a mother, Life's Work.  

June 27:  The idea that patchwork can be a way to not worry.  If I make a lot of patchwork sections - a pile of them without worrying - and then just worry later whether they can fit together or not.  Don't worry first.  Worry last.

June 28:  We had a good sleep in our own bed although I had to add my heavy velvet quilt.  It worked.  First we go to Mike Shain's funeral, and then back to the family, all arriving by tomorrow.  

July 3:  A milestone for me because I swam at the back channel.  I was considering not coming back if I couldn't swim.  Baked two cakes and lay on the day bed with Suvi in the afternoon.  The cakes were for Grace's and my birthday.  Played Clue until late.  Aili won. 

July 4:   Jay gets up early and today he swam to Yrrah from Buffy's many times. I've been having more pain these last few days.

July 7:  I go into my stitching with my daydream mind and my intelligent hand, and ignore the body.

July 8:  You are here, alive, completely alive.  That is a miracle.  Thich Nhat Hanh

Included in the post are fragments from my written journal in combination with the sunlight and shadow quilt I took with me to the wedding and then the family cottage.  Life was turbulent and beautiful with all my children and grandchildren.    

Anna Wagner Ott

Shield:  threads, yarns, tyvek, acrylic paint  31 x 36 inches 2023  

Unfurling:  tyvek, yarn, thread, masking tape, acrylic paint
48 x 24 inches  2024

Anna Wagner Ott

Anna was born in England and emigrated to Canada at an early age.  Her art education includes degrees from University of Toronto and University of Alberta and a PHD in art education from Penn State.  She taught art at California State University from 2000 - 2013.  Her work has been displayed in multiple solo and group exhibitions. Her studio was in Barry's Bay, near Ottawa, Canada.  She was a prolific maker and showed her work as well as the process of creating it almost daily on the social media platforms of facebook and instagram.  She was a constant participant in international exhibitions such as Canada's World of Threads.  Anna Wagner Ott passed away suddenly and quietly on Christmas Eve 2024, a great loss to so many who had come to love her through her work.

"In the process of creating, I endeavor to connect with the pain of loss and insecurity, the act of concealing truths, the inherent vulnerability of life and death, and the inevitable process of disintegration and impermanence.  Yet, I also seek to capture the sparks of beauty that often emerge with the transitions and fading away.  My art serves as a continuous effort to piece together fragments of my own experiences, sometimes building up my weavings, and at other times deconstructing them - a symbolic reconstruction of my psyche, a continual process of destruction and reclamation of myself."

Her daughters wrote on Instagram:  "Anna was a true artist.  Art wasn't just what she did, it was who she was.  While she was also a devoted wife of 55 years, a loving mother to her children, an Oma to her 7 grandchildren, a sister, an aunt, and a friend, her life's purpose was clear, she was here to be an artist.  Her death was unexpected and we are still processing its suddenness."  

Because of the internet, there are many places that we can view her work and listen to her voice.  Two good ones are her own website, Anna Wagner-OTT and the fibre arts take two interview from 2022. 

number 3 of Canadian Artists who work with Textiles

Loving Red:  yarn and wax, 4 feet wide, 5 feet tall  2022 by Anna Wagner OTT

wedding

Our daughter Grace married Tim on Saturday June 21 2025.

A beautiful event. 

all the lived emotions

A couple of years ago I wrapped up some textiles that I had saved for a long time as a way to tidy things up.  I called them Mothering Bundles and took 42 of them to local curator Nicole Weppler in 2023.  She hung about 20 of them up in the Gore Bay museum.  See here.  

I like the unusual combination of nostalgia and minimalism that the mothering bundles embody. Wrapped in wool blanket cloth and numbered because without a list, it was impossible to tell what was inside each one.   

They had become little still points.  Separate sacred mysteries.

I re-wrapped 25 of them this past May with fabrics from failed online clothing purchases and unfinished quilt tops.  They became more individual, more interesting. 

They are each different from one another, yet retain the minimalist aesthetic I prefer. 

However, it's still impossible to remember what is inside them without a chart. 

 

This teaches me that our inner world is secret and can never be known just by looking at the surface. 

A few of these newly wrapped bundles make up a two-part sculpture.  "All the Lived Emotions".

(To give you an idea of what I've wrapped, the bundle at the top of this post contains the t-shirts that I wore in the 70's when we biked through Europe.  The next one contains the mermaid costume I made our 7 year old.  The last one holds fabrics from close friends who have since died.)  

Janice Wright Cheney: Widow

Janice Wright Cheney

Janet Wright Cheney's life-sized bear, Widow, is armoured nose to paw in felted woollen roses and a velvet hide.  She is beautiful, but strangely so.  She even seems aware of her strangeness, questioning - how did this come to be?  It's partly in her posture.  She stands up on her hind quarters as bears do to sniff the air, seeking the lay of the land, puzzled.  She seems caught in an ongoing moment of self-bewilderment - an appropriate attitude for the grieving, for whom the balance of the whole world has shifted, making every day into a question.                                                                                                                                      The bear has a fairy-tale quality, connoting Sleeping Beauty, hidden behind a wall of roses.  But rather than a pre-adolescent waiting to be woken and learn the ways of an adult lover, this is an adult learning to live with the loss of her life partner.  As a widow-bear, the line is blurred between human and animal as fairy tales so often do, brothers metamorphosing into swans, frogs into princes, Wright Cheney's bear is implied to be living out a gendered grief, culturally ascribed, one that seems more human than animal.  Though on the other hand, grief is a wild emotion, one that may well turn us into some bearish version of ourselves.   read more of Sue Sinclair's review of Widow here  

The artist says:  "I saw a dead bear on the side of the highway, curled up like it was sleeping.  The sight of it filled me with a terrible sadness.  I thought, who mourns for this bear?  Who loved this bear?  My work Widow is the bear that is left behind, the bear that grieves.  This work explores the impossibility of reconciling love, and desire, with death.  So it had to be big:  it had to be a grizzly bear, because I wanted to express the enormity of grief." 

Janice Wright Cheney lives in Fredericton, New Brunswick where she continues to make art and also teaches at the New Brunswick College of Craft and Design.    Click here to view her website. 

This is the second post of a new series on this blog.  

Canadian Artists who Work with Textiles