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  

My quilts help me to be brave.

Last Tuesday Rachel from Breaking the Blocks / Crafty Monkees interviewed me.  She asks artists to talk about their lives and how their artwork helps them cope. I woke up that morning wondering what I might say. 

What are my "blocks"?  

How do I "break" them?  

One block would be isolation but the internet broke that one for me. 

Another could be the mothering of four kids.   Many people would say this.

Except that I truly believe that motherhood gave me a subject and a reason to create so it was not a block for me.  It was a door.

Maybe I could talk about the breakthrough that happened when I became aware of my inner world and how huge it is and how stitching gives that world to me.  

It's interesting that this interview comes along at the same time as I've been working on my memoir.

My recent self study gave me more confidence when I spoke with Rachel.   

1.  I grew up in an isolated rural place with lots of books and art supplies and plenty of solitude.

2.  I met and married Ned early and had the four kids.  We determined to raise them with natural beauty outside their door.  Around age 30 I discovered how I could use traditional quilt pattern as a code to tell the intimate stories that were happening in my life.  I did a lot of teaching of watercolour painting, art quilting and classical piano for about 20 years along with full time parenting.  It was a busy time. 

3  In 2005, we had an empty nest and this began a new period.  Digital photography.  The internet.  

In 2006, I started writing this blog.   I took a degree in embroidery from the UK.  I retired from in-person teaching.  Over the next twenty years I stepped back into solitude and into the inner world.  

4  I guess that I am now in the period of my 'late work'.  

The unavoidable fact of life is death, but handmade quilts challenge that.  My quilts will outlive me.

Human mortality is a major 'block' for everyone but those of us who create hand-made objects break that block.   

All the images in this post are of a piece that I thought was finished.  See it here on my website.   I cut it in half up the middle and put a lovely wool batt in between the two pieces.  I've really been enjoying stitching it during this beautiful month of May.  

The title will stay the same:  Sky With Many Moons.

The podcast is available where ever you get your podcasts. Rachel called our podcast The Art of Imperfection.  Here is a link.   

Frances Dorsey: Shot Through The Heart

Frances Dorsey

When Frances Dorsey was seven to ten years old, she lived in Saigon, Viet Nam.   She remembers "a paradise on the edge of conflagration".  When she was twenty-one, she moved to Canada.  She has a duel citizenship with USA.  "I am a citizen of North America."

This piece, Shot Through the Heart, is made from used table linens that have been naturally dyed with extracts and earth oxides, as well as discharged and immersion dyed with mechanical resists.  Some have been  over printed with silk screen and also with block printing. The linens were cut up and reassembled.  They were embroidered hand stitched.  It is a large piece:  11 feet x 11 feet.  It was made in 2010. 

Suzanne Smith Arney saw this piece at a conference in Nebraska in 2010, and wrote about it in the fall 2011 of the Surface Design Association's journal.

"The napkins and tablecloths are soft with age and use.  Looking closely, I can make out a nine-block structure, with those blocks subdivided into four.  Each discovery revealed another level to decipher.  Stepping closer, I read the fabrics' histories written in monograms, embroidery, as well as small tears and stains.  Dorsey added her own text in faded yellow, red and purple dyes.  There are folds and stitchings and photo -derived images of her father's army photos and letters, such as b-52s and mortars.  I read the title and stepped back.  Shot Through the Heart infuses the room with a chilly clarity; the whole and partial circles are no more suns than dinner plates.  They are targets."

Frances Dorsey taught about textiles at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design for sixteen years.  Her father was a rifleman "who relived his combat daily."    She currently lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada and continues to make thoughtful and beautiful artwork with textiles.  

This is the first post about a new series on this blog:  

Canadian artists who work with Textiles  

In a While, Crocodile

Here is another post about writing my book.  

Since 2000, I have been trying to archive my art work and relate it to the timeline of my life.   

In one of my bookshelves is a binder from 2001 that has images of my work beside typed and printed journal entries that match chronologically. 

It is fascinating - to me. 

In 2015, I began the My Process blog in another attempt to put my creative process into context with my lived life.  A photo of what is on the design wall is paired with the most recent entry of my written journal, just to explore how real life and creating art connect.  

It's fascinating - to me.

  

In 2019 I hired an assistant to help me put my archives in order.  Her job ended with the pandemic but I am very grateful for the google-drive lists of work and for the binders of organized pre-internet paperwork. 

It’s the daily practice of decluttering our house that brought me back to this autobiographical project.  Boxes of slides, envelopes of negatives.  What are they if not clutter?  There are now two APPs on my phone that translate slides and negatives into digital format.  (example of a slide below) 

morning kindergarten watercolour by Judy Martin 1985

I am so hung up on this project.   I only get so far before I talk myself out of continuing.   I think to myself: ‘Why would anyone read this?’ and also ‘What if someone reads this? 

What would they think?

Would they be hurt?

Would they be bored?’

Yet, if I had Judy Martin in my art quilting class, I would say to her:  "Why are you thinking about the audience so much?  Do what your own inner self tells you to!  Make your own self yearn to touch that textile.  If you don't want to stare at that art and contemplate it, who else will?  Give yourself permission to be comforted by your own quilt."    

 

And so, I will continue with my book.    

(I do not need to publish it)  

See you later. Alligator.

See you soon, Baboon. 

In a while, Crocodile. 

my book

Have I mentioned that I'm writing a book?  

I want to put my life and my artwork into some kind of meaningful context.

At first I thought that if I  collected the entries from this blog into something poetic, that would be enough. ‘The Best of Judy's Journal’ kind of thing.

However, Judy's Journal is image based, and the photos in it are not of high enough resolution to be printed.  Without the photos, it wouldn't be half as interesting.  

And besides, ‘the best of judy's journal' is not really what I want to do.  

What I really want to do is gather up my life and work into a single document.

For the last dozen years I've been transcribing every word that I've written in over two hundred journals for 45 minutes a day into my laptop.  At the same time I'm organizing them into chronological order.

A couple of weeks ago, I started an edit and focused on those journals I kept during the Thunder Bay and Kenora years (before 1992).  This is the time in my life when I embraced quilt making as my art form.  It also happened to be the busiest years of mothering.   

I'm calling what I’m writing a first draft.  

I know it’s serious because I've been writing this thing during the time I used to spend stitching.  

(The barn photos in this post were taken from the back seat of our car.  Oona, our oldest, was visiting and to celebrate we went for a drive towards and along the southern part of Manitoulin Island.)

And then, 

Last night, I found a huge box of family negatives in the downstairs closet.  

I couldn't tell what the negatives were depicting until I taught myself how to scan them with my phone using an app.  I knew that they were of 'that time' in my life but I hadn't expected them to be so beautiful.  Magical.       

It seemed like the two things came together, my editing of that special time and then these nostalgic images. 

So that's what I'm up to this month.  

Just thought I'd let you know.