The Aesthetic of Simplicity

the beauty 2026

 

We have been taught that textiles either a) protect and nurture or b) demonstrate social status and cultural belonging.  These two purposes remain, regardless of the time or the culture.

The exception is art textiles.  Art textiles do what art does which is to communicate wonder.  

Wonder is an impassioned state that takes the viewer beyond a horizon line.  We are surprised by wonder.  Wonder is beyond intellect.  Wonder is an aesthetic experience at the brink of our senses, and when wonder happens, we experience an existential condition.  Art can give us this. 

Art textiles can give us this. 

sky with many moons  2025

Art work that has a minimal composition, but that is exceedingly rich in material, 

that has a wealth of texture, adjustments, and repetitive marks, 

and that has the touch of the hand and therefore, the movement of the makers’ body

has wonder embedded within.  

The time it took is embedded in the work.  The labour is embedded in the work. 

 softer and dreamier 2024

There is space for contemplation.  There is an aesthetic of simplicity. 

Every unnecessary element is discarded. 

Simple lines, a minimal palette and labour intensive mark making.  

Every unnecessary element discarded.

love the soul inside of me 2023

Every unnecessary element is discarded.  

In order to create work that is emotional, and that enables viewers to access their own immensity within, is it necessary for the artist to withdraw into isolation for a period of time?  Yes, I think so.  .  

“We should work for simple, good, undecorated things, but things which are in harmony with the human being and organically suited to the little man on the street.”  Alvar Aalto, 1957. 

Images in this post are a mini retrospective of recent work, one piece for each year.  The text is from the introduction to the 2010 dissertation I wrote for my 2012 BA from England,  The Immensity Within Ourselves. .

Going Slow

Mornings are slow lately.  It’s like I’m on pause.   I may wake up at 7:15 but it is 9:00 before I rise.  

The plant in the bedroom needs water so I carry it to the kitchen.  When I open the window above the sink and look out at the garden and the yard,  the staring begins.

I do more staring in my favourite chair with my coffee.  Things go through my mind as I stare. 

For example, there is a quilt on the wall that I stare at.  It's wearing out from old age, and I've started to mend it. 

'Mom, if you saw that quilt on someone else's instagram, you'd like it' says my daughter who doesn't think I should alter it.  

All the things I'd like to do overwhelm me and my head fills up with obligations.  Some of them are about the people I've reached out to and then let drop. 

My old journals are packed with ideas and sketches.  Really, why do I feel that I have to find new ideas? I have so many saved ones.

I also get snagged by social media.  I spent time looking at Emma Larsson's feed.  She is a self-taught Swedish artist who paints wet floral shapes from her imagination in uncanny ways.  I think this was a good thing for me.  I think it was.

I was going to finish reading the art book Unravel:The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art this morning.   That’s what I was going to do while in this chair.  

There are so many things to do that I want to do, but I just can't.  I stare at them and think about them, and then I think about something else, and then some one else and then a new thing. 

I have been so busy lately with my work and with my family.

Now, I wonder if it is really OK for me to not have time for anything but my work and my family.  To not have time for friends and hanging out and writing and responding to emails and listening to gossip and personal health problems with other women.  If it’s OK to not have time to walk near a river or sit in the grass and feel it touch my neck when I lie down on it because all I have time for is my work and my family. 

The images in this post are of the two nearly identical big-girl quilts that I'm making for the twins (now three and a half).  Except for images five and six which are of the SISU pillow I gave my almost 6-year-old granddaughter who started a new school last week. 

"What does SISU mean? asked her aunt."  

"Be Brave" she replied.   

The Mothering Bundles in Toronto

Since 2022, I have been tidying up items I've saved from my artist-mothering life by wrapping them in pieces of wool blanket.   

I call the resulting objects Mothering Bundles.

#33  

Each bundle has a number so that I can remember what is inside it because I forget what is inside a bundle almost as soon as I start stitching it shut.

Number 33 above contains:  Two maternity blouses that I embroidered, the small tea cloth that the young Brownies in Rainy River embroidered and gave me when I left my teaching job to move in with Ned and marry him.  Also contained in this same bundle are several friendship bracelets made by my daughters.

in the window, our daughter April's quilt, Spider Silk

Art is not just a respite or escape, it is a formidable tool for gaining perspective in troubled times.  Olivia Laing

I made a list of what is inside each bundle.  

So far, there are 38.  

It is an ongoing project and I hope to continue to bundle.

Sometimes, I need to open one up and retrieve an item so this list is valuable.  

(There is also a small green account book with written details about bundle contents).  

It is necessary to abolish distinction between art and life.  Marcel Duchamp  1957

the quilt on the wall is called Sunflower Sky

They are simple things, these bundles

They feel safe and calm.

They invite you to slow down and consider your own life.

They help you to connect to your inner self.

They are as mysterious as the stars in the sky.

#20

Number 20 (above) contains eleven canvas draw-string camping bags that Ned inherited from his cousin Richard.  Labelled with black ink, ( coffee, flour, white beans, rice, brown sugar, wheat porridge, candy, spices, milk powder and tea) they are in two sizes.  

from left to right:  Judy Martin's The Beauty of the Green Earth, some Mothering Bundles, and then April Martin's Neptune in Pices, Hourglass in the Sky, Same Same (above) and June Skies (below) Far right is Judy Martin's Lake Full of Stars.  

The images in this post are of the exhibition I had in Toronto this past summer with my artist daughter, April Martin.  We both exhibited hand stitched quilts.  

The exhibition was entitled Earlier and Later and it was held at the Craft Ontario gallery at 401 Richmond St, Toronto.  June 17 - July 25, 2026.

All photos in this post are professional documentation of the exhibition by Jocelyn Reynolds.

You have to follow your work even if it seeems ridiculous.  Follow your intuition.  Go with your work.  Kiki Smith

Kimsooja

Ned and I went to see the Kimsooja exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Toronto.  It was really beautiful and I wrote about it over on my Modernist Aesthetic Blog  I hope that you will go to that blog and read more.  Click here.

With a big sky and with elm trees

My coming-of-age time (13 or so).

I'm the one in the aqua coat and no boots.

I grew up in North Western Ontario, ten miles west of Fort Frances.  It was a flat area, with reasonable land for farming.  My father built our home and continued to build it for my whole childhood, often moving rooms or stairwells while I was at school.  He was born in Finland and immigrated to this area of Northern Ontario with his mother when he was 5 years old.  I am very proud to be 50 percent Finnish.  I feel that the aesthetic of noble poverty and simplicity and love of lakes and nature is part of that culture and is evident in Finnish design.  My mother was born in Fort Frances, and married my father when she was a school teacher in a rural school.  She loved elegance and made her own clothes using Vogue patterns.  She loved literature, especially Virginia Woolf, and she loved learning, teaching herself French from reading mystery novels, and psychology through distance education.  She had allergies and had to take needles for them when I was growing up.  She was very shy and so we never went anywhere or had anyone over to our house.  I felt isolated and wanted to get out of there, move to a city, see art and movies and interesting people.  I wanted to go to university and study literature or art.  On the other hand, my mother’s love for culture meant that there was good literature in the house all the time and lots of magazines and art supplies for us to use.  I took piano lessons and got quite far in the Royal conservatory exams.  You can see the landscape in the background – the horizon and the sky and the elm trees, there is an especially beautiful and large beautiful tree just out of sight in this photo, at the corner of our driveway and the highway.  There was a long bus ride east towards the high school in town or west when we were younger to the new public school in Devlin.  

I believe that our childhood and youth inform our creative work more than we realize.  Early in my career I read Originals by Eleanor Munro, a book of interviews of American women artists. Munro always asked the artists about their childhood landscape and time and again, that landscape would appear in some way in their mature art.

My childhood landscape was one of isolation and emptiness.  

With a big sky and creative parents.  With elm trees and a highway and a sister and a brother.  

Mended Rail Fence

 One of my projects at the cottage was mending this rail fence quilt that I made in 1976. 

The fabrics were newly purchased especially for this piece.  I've had to replace some of the worn out cottons and I've used mostly velvet to do so.  

Usually I did the work in bed before going to sleep.  I worked with the reading light on my side of the bed.  It was a quiet and nourishing thing for me to do after a busy day.

I grandmothered during the day time.  Sometimes the grandmothering resembled patchwork.

We had a fam-jam on Canada Day. 

The big news for this year is that our oldest took ownership of her great uncle's cottage.  It’s quite near the  main one.    

This quilt was originally made as a wedding gift for my sister, the second quilt I ever made.  I look forward to returning it to her as she celebrates 50 years with her guy.  

quilts on show in the outdoor gallery

Sunflower Sky

Sky With Many Moons

The Beauty of the  Green Earth

Lake Full of Stars

Trembling Heart

Field of Light

Mothering Bundles

I live in a beautiful place.  I am so grateful to be here and to be able to keep doing this quilting gig.  The quilts pictured here among the cedar trees near the water are my part of the exhibition currently installed at the Craft Ontario gallery in Toronto, Canada alongside ten other quilts by my artist daughter, April.  It’s my birthday today and I am celebrating all these things.  

I`m 75.

I`m alive.

that`s my poem for today.  xo

our mother-daughter exhibition

 April and I began installing our exhibition today.

We have put together a mother-daughter show of new hand stitched quilts. 

Earlier and Later is the title we chose for it.  

The curator, Robyn Wilcox, figured out the placement.  My husband Ned was first assistant.

April's quilts dance into a future.  My quilts are steeped in my personal history.  April and I are part of a long tradition of creativity, women makers, and the passing on of skills. It's exciting for the two of us to be showing together at the Craft Ontario gallery in the city of Toronto.  I'm very proud of her and of our rich relationship.  

The opening reception is in one week in the early evening of  June 18.  Our joint talk with the curator is on June 20 at 2 pm.  

The Beauty of the Green Earth,
 hand stitched quilt, Tree Everlasting pattern
 by Judy Martin 2026