Colour With a U

2006

 In Canada, we spell colour with a u.  We also spell labour, favour, honour and neighbour with a u.

flesh and blood 2007

 That 'u' could stand for unique, unforgettable, universal, unity, understanding, utopia.

2008

 It could include the unusual, unexpected, unbound, unabashed, unaccounted, uncanny.

light of the moon 2009

 We care about the 'u', it makes us unique.  We care about the 'you', it brings us together..

2010

What do the Canadian values of diversity and inclusion mean to you?
How does your labour in your favourite medium honour your neighbourhood, your community?

energy cloth 2011

How do you colour yourself into our Canadian culture?

niagra falls 2012

We are looking for artworks that visualize these ideas and that together will give an insightful
perspective on our Canadian cultural identity.

2013

All types of work are encouraged, including representational, abstract, and social commentary,
in 2 or 3 dimensions.

lake 2014

Opening location:  Homer Watson House and Gallery, Kitchener Ontario Canada
March 15 - April 19, 2020

2015  providence

The exhibition will travel across Canada until March 2023.

This is a Studio Art Quitls Association exhibition for Canadian members of SAQA only.
Read the full Call for Entry at this SAQA link

Entries must be received by January 3, 2020.
For further questions, please contact Tracey Lawko, chairperson of the exhibition committee.

2016

 All text in this post is from the Call for Entry for Colour For A U for Canadian readers of this blog.

the cloud in me 2017  

 The images are a celebration of my years of blogging.
I chose one from each year:   2006 until 2019.

2018

See the sidebar for further details about this call and information about
the SAQA conference in Toronto 2020.

my awakened heart 2019

To move slowly alongside

The solitude and quiet emptiness that I find on Manitoulin continues to be very important to my development as an artist.  I intentionally withdraw from people and put a lot of time into my work.  I touch my work a lot as I stitch it.

My pieces are large and simple, which makes it easy for my viewer to enter them.  They are safe, calm places.   I consider them a gift and am generous with the labour I put into my work.

I am planning an installation that uses old wool blankets to make a monumental walk-through corridor.  The rock cuts along the new highway 400 are the inspiration for this new work.  In northern Ontario, large areas of the Canadian Shield have been sliced open by blasting and heavy equipment to reveal eons of time and layers of beautiful sediment and crystals and minerals.

From the speeding car, we are able to look with awe at these magnificent grand pieces of Canada.  Trees grow on top of some of them.  There is something spiritual within these rock cuts.  The car keeps on moving.

My installation of blankets will encourage people to walk slowly alongside at an intimate closeness to the work.   I hope that people will experience the scale and weight of the familiar wool fabric, with their bodies.  Yearning to touch but not touching, and somehow feeling some deep truth of lived emotions that are part of our human experience.

The installation will have two parts, each part made from two or three blankets sewn together and bordered top and bottom with still more blanket cloth.  One part is shown in this post, and it measures 14 feet wide and 10 feet high.  The nick name for this part is Ash and Rose.

Blankets are already full of human time before I work with them.  Generations of time.  The marks of those hands and bodies have left signs of wear and all I have done is add more time and touch with hand stitch.  Both sides.

Materials such as blankets that relate to our universal human experiences in bed where things like birth, death, power or lack of power, pain, comfort, protection, and sex happen, are powerful metaphors.  Making crafted objects from them is contemporary art.

I work with hand stitch and used domestic cloth.
I make hand made things that invite the use of all our senses, especially the sense of touch. 

continuing on

 everything is so alive

there are many possibilities

 I added energy marks to my blanket piece over the weekend

 It was Canada Day and my sidekicks were with us at the cottage

April made daily sourdough

 I started again with the grey blanket

and the sky continued to hold the moon

mississippi valley textile museum

I went to Ottawa in the middle of June to visit Grace and April joined us from Toronto.
On the Saturday morning, we drove over to Almonte to see Tania Love's exhibition on its final day.

Besides Tania's beautiful mixed fibre pieces, I wanted to re-visit the interesting and challenging gallery space at the mississippi valley textile museum.

The Rosamond gallery is on the main floor of what used to be a textile mill.  The thick walls and original windows have an authentic presence.

I'm extra interested because Penny Berens and I will be opening our own two person show in this gallery space in 2021 and I felt a need to walk through it.   I love this gallery space and have visited several times, one of those is described here.

Tania's work is hung from the ceiling and we moved among the vertical shapes.  There was an amazing communication between the kozo paper hangings and the spirit of this place.

 Lots of space for Penny and I.

Pathways: pigment on mixed fibre 2019  Tanya Love

The curator installs every exhibition with great respect.  In this case, these lightweight paper hangings that remind us of water tumble from the ceiling in variety of placements.  They evoke the river that runs through Almonte, and the waterfall in the center of town.  This exhibition honours water, our precious natural resource.

 Even the floor inspires me.

pathways 2019  pigment on mixed fibre  2019   Tania Love

On July 13, Those of Us Still Living,  an exhibition of repurposed denim by Jim Arendt opens at the MVTM.   Jim won the first place award at Fiberart International last month.    

mystical landscape

go on
move forward

consent
receive

give myself to the open

 make my way without a map

 trust beyond measure

if something is to come, something sublime
it is through risk

leading no one knows where

because there are still flowers
there is the rose

the rose forever opening for the first and the last time

images of sky with many moons, wool, indigo, hand stitch, completed today,
text by Luce Irigaray
the title of the post is because I started reading Mystical Landscapes am filled with emotion by the words and images.        

time is a beautiful whirl

Not To Know But To Go On by Judy Martin at the Thunder Bay Art Gallery 2013, Canada

Q:  Can you please describe how to do the couching technique that you use on your big journal-sculpture, Not To Know But To Go On.   Thank you.

Not To Know But To Go On at the World of Threads Festival 2014 Oakville Canada

Lately, I have received several emails with questions and this post contains a brief tutorial about the technique in Not To Know But To Go On, and also some exciting news about it. 

Not To Know But To Go On at Mary Black Gallery Halifax Canada with Penny Berens in exhibition Cloth of Time 2016

First the news:
Not To Know But To Go On is part of the new SAQA global exhibition, 3-D Expression.  This show opens in Grand Rapids Michigan in September and travels until 2023.  I shipped it to SAQA at the end of May.

Q:  What type of material do you couch onto?
 A:  I cut panels from artist cotton canvas to measure about 13" x 22", and then later stitched them together with cotton tape.

Q:  Are you using regular quilting fabric cut into strips?  If so, how wide?  Do you finish your edges?

A:  The type of fabric varies.  I use cotton quilting and dress-making fabric, linens, silks, polyester sheer fabric,  and re-purposed clothing. The fabrics were collected over my years of being a quilt maker and a mother, and I only used fabrics that I love.  I tear strips of the fabric about 3/4 inch wide and do not finish the edges.  Rather I roll it into itself and lay it on the base cloth. Once I decide on a piece of cloth, I use it all up.

I couch the cloth to the base with the thread in a wrapping stitch.  This stitch looks as good on the back as it does on the front.  (see below photo)

First and foremost, this is a piece about time, three years of time.  That’s 1068 days.

Q:  What kind of thread do you use?
A:   I use ordinary cotton embroidery floss.  One complete skein for each day all six strands at one time.  I closed my eyes when I chose the thread so that I would not select something to match the cloth.  I had to trust that the threads and the cloth would be OK.

It resembles a rag rug, and actually, I was inspired by the narrow Finnish rugs of my heritage, but it is hand stitched, not woven.

Q:  What is the difference between a couching stitch and a wrapping stitch?
A:  They are the same thing. 

Every day for three years I threaded my needle and attached the strips of cloth to the canvas with a wrapping stitch or couching stitch.  An extra benefit is that the wrapping gesture of this stitch is very meditative and healing to do.

Time is a beautiful whirl.  Time is both the subject and the main material in this piece.  Day after day, time rushes by no matter the family event or world crises.  Time is relentless, and we have to trust.  We have to go on.  It will be OK.

SAQA (Studio Art Quilt Association) has many global exhibitions touring at this time.
And wow, there is a call for all Canadian SAQA members.  Click here to read the Call for Entry.