we have hardly begun, we are already here

tiny red hearths 

she was born 2014, the quilt was finished in 2015

velvet shapes

she was born 2017, quilt was finished 2018

cotton pinwheels

she was born 2020

quilt not finished yet.  Pictured are front and back, hand pieced.

the 10 year old.

the seven year old

the almost four year old.  

indulge me

Conversation with Susan Sontag in my mind

Me:  When I think about my work, I can't think of any reason to do it. 

         I can't think of any meaning to what I'm doing in it.

Only when I don't think about the meaning of it, or the value of it, or the importance of it, can I enjoy my work.

And I do enjoy my work.

Susan:  When we ask ourselves a question for a long while without getting a satisfactory answer, there is usually something wrong with the question.

Humans didn't ask art to justify itself until the late 19th century.  We didn't ask art to be useful or practical. 

Useful, necessary activities are different from voluntary, playful, dreamy ones.

Let's say that  practicing an art is the second type of activity.  Let's say that is why we are drawn to it.

Then it is a mistake to be demoralized because we can't justify it for not being the first type of activity..  It fails to be a number one type of activity, but it is not supposed to be.

The qualities of being voluntary and being free are what drew us to making art in the first place.  When we try to make art a number one activity we start to doubt our worth.  The worth of the activity and also our own personal worth.  It's demoralizing. 

Vagueness is not only a condition for art and for literature.

Vagueness is a condition for any life of the mind.

Vagueness is necessary for humanity.

As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh:  Journals and Notebooks 1964 - 1980                                                                                                          of Susan Sontag edited by her son David Rieff. 

Joyce Wieland

Balling  1961  oil on canvas by Joyce Wieland

I visited the National Gallery of Canada a few weeks ago.  I looked around for my favourite artist, Joyce Wieland and found four of her pieces in a quiet area and photographed them for this post.  The National Gallery of Canada has a large collection of Wieland's work in their permanent collection.  (listed here).  In 1987 Wieland had a retrospective at the Art Gallery of Ontario and art critic Geoffrey James covered it for Maclean's magazine.  His article as well as Johanne Sloan's most excellent online book about Joyce Wieland are sources for this post.    

Joyce Wieland was born in 1930 in Toronto.  Her parents died before Joyce turned 9.  She went to Toronto Central Technical school to study dress making, but the art teacher, Doris McCarthy, encouraged her to switch to art.  Wieland became a commercial artist for four years and designed packaging and animated films.  In 1956, age 26, she met and married artist Michael Snow.  The couple went to New York in in the early 60's and returned home in 1971.  The painting at the top of this post is from that time in her life, when New York was bursting with abstract expressionism.  Balling is one of Wieland's  Time Machine series of paintings.  Joyce called them 'sex poetry'.  A significant painting from this time is Heart On,  which you can view in this link.  

Joyce Wieland used a wide variety of media.  Film.  Quilts.  Paintings.  Assemblage.  She was what we would call now, a multi-disciplinary artist.  Geoffrey James wrote:  "Hers is not a body of work that offers a clear progression of a single, recognizable style.  Instead, the viewer is confronted by what appears to be sudden, impulsive leaps."

Spring Blues  1960 oil, paper collage, mirror on canvas by Joyce Wieland

Wieland experimented with media.  Spring Blues is an example of how she broke away from the dominant New York art style.  The mirrors are there because she wanted to include the viewer's reflection.  She would be pleased by how the National Gallery is protecting this fragile piece with a plexiglass frame which clearly shows my reflection looking and photographing this bright painting, now a bit damaged from age.  For a better view of this painting, have a look at this article from the Globe and Mail - you will need to scroll down to find Joyce's piece.  

spring blues detail

While many of her art works had to do with male-female relationships, Wieland is also known for art that communicates a great love for Canada.  In 1971, at the age of 41, she was given a solo exhibition at the National Gallery of Canada entitled True Patriot Love, the first ever living female artist to have such a thing, a truly remarkable achievement.  In her National Gallery exhibition, she showcased the work of women who embroidered, knitted,  and made quilts.  A celebration of sisterhood and domestic art a few years before Judy Chicago's The Dinner Party (1974-79).  A photo of a rarely seen  set of knitted flags from this exhibition is here.   The best thing about the True Patriot Love exhibition for me is the catalogue for it, a government publication on Arctic Flora that Wieland altered with photos and sketches.  With this simple subversive act, she highlighted another overlooked domestic art, The Scrapbook.

Confed Spread 1967  plastic and cloth by Joyce Wieland

In 1967, when Wieland still lived in New York she made many pieces about her love for Canada.  Confed Spread, shown above, was first shown in Canada at Expo 67 to celebrate Canada's 100th birthday. 

Cooling Room II  1964  metal toy airplane, cloth, metal wire, plastic boat, paper collage, ceramic cups with lipstick spoon, mounted in painted wooden case by Joyce Wieland 

Also from the 60's are the many boxed and plastic wrapped assemblages, one of which was on display in Ottawa.  They seem like film strips and tell stories.  Planes plummet, sailboats sink, and elements of disaster, travel, love, and time passing are the plot.  Joanne Sloan has written about these and also Joyce's quilts here.  

If you google Joyce Wieland now,  Joyce Wieland Canadian Filmmaker comes up first, because film making was a primary medium for her.  Her work in film culminated in the full length feature film, The Far Shore in 1976, a love story loosely inspired by one of Canada's star artists, Tom Thomson.  The MacLean's article implies that this film, a five year project, took a toll on Wieland and she almost stopped making films, and turned to painting and drawing with coloured pencil in the 80's.  Then in 1990, Wieland was diagnosed with Alzheimer's. 

Cooling Room  II detail by Joyce Wieland.  This sculpture is named for the words printed on the box that Wieland used to make the assemblage.  

When she died at the age of 68 in 1998, women artists across Canada mourned her.

Two biographies came out 3 years later in 2001.  Jane Lind's Joyce Wieland:  Artist on Fire and Iris Nowell's Joyce Wieland:  A Life in Art.

I've written about Joyce Wieland on modernist aesthetic.  I'm a fan.  Her name comes up in eleven different posts on this blog.   Here's one from 2009.   

The National Gallery in Ottawa,  Ontario,  Canada is a beautiful place to visit for humans of all ages.  It has the feeling of a grand, clean, cool palace of culture.  (My companion here is 18 months)  

Not from the Real World

Yesterday,  I woke up and spread my Dresden plate quilt on the table.

Then I made a schedule for the five days I have before the Birmingham festival of quilts show is picked up from my house on Manitoulin  Island, Canada for delivery to England.

Saturday June 22:   Mend these Dresden Plate appliques with velvet. 

Sunday 23 - Wash and block this large quilt.  Finish making all display sleeves.  

Monday 24 - Make a list of the fourteen pieces.  Include measurements, insurance values and updated titles and send it to the organizers.  Finish all remaining sewing.  Begin folding quilts with tissue paper and plastic bags.  Start packing the boxes.  

Tuesday June 25 - Finish boxing up the exhibition with care.  Label everything. 

Wednesday June 26-  The boxes will be picked up between 10 am and 5 pm.

At the moment, the exhibition is stacked on chairs around the house.    

I've worked so hard for this solo show.  I've worked 10 hours a day for over a year.  

I've been able to do it by working on three different pieces each day for one week, and then switching to three new ones the following week.  I've had to abandon a few that I just couldn't finish.

Most of the pieces are large scale. Most are very simple, and have grids of dots or circles.

They are abstract, folk-like.  They are not representational.

Not from the real world.  Not from the news.

The quilts in this exhibition seem to be a throw back to a simpler time.   

The quilts in this exhibition speak the traditional language of quilts.  

They use traditional patterns.  They use fabrics that come to hand such as sewing scraps, repurposed domestic fabrics, and pieces of clothing.

The fabrics in the Dresden Plate quilt have faded.  Some of them are worn out and need replacing.  Why?  They are all at least fifty years old.  The fabrics in the applique's are from my high school and early marriage sewing projects.  I unpicked the circles from the worn white cotton that was the original background of a quilt I made as a bride, and placed them onto new squares of silk, linen, or lightweight wool cloth.  

I remember that sensuous time in my youthful life every time I touch one of those fabrics.

Now, touching the velvet replacement patches will send me off into a different kind of dream world.  

I look forward to sleeping with this quilt once the show is done.  The new title of the Dresden Plate quilt is You are a Single Star.

C.G. Jung called the circle and square combination a metaphor for the inner life.

All the Time in the World

you are a single star - finishing the quilting 
a week ago

When I run after what I think I want

                            you are a single star - sewing on the binding - in the car on way to cottage                                         Thursday June 6

My days are a furnace

love the soul inside of me  - making a sleeve
Friday June 7 

of stress and anxiety. 

the good and the true - making a display sleeve for it
Saturday June 8

If I sit in my own place of patience, 

Ned's 75th

what I need flows to me, 

April with some of her work at the cottage
Monday June 10

and without pain.  

Ben holding up my Cloudy Day piece 
Monday June 10

From this I understand that

home on Manitoulin with my garden
Tuesday June 11

what I want also wants me, 

The promotion for the interview begins
Wednesday June 12

is looking for me and attracting me.  

making a sleeve for your fragile life
Thursday June 13

There is a great secret here

love meditation: intimacy and new sleeve
Thursday June 13

For anyone who can grasp it.          Rumi

Friday June 14

Click HERE to view the hour long interview on YouTube.  Thank you Fibre Arts Take Two!  
 

My job

My job is to observe and to pay attention to feelings that come over me and then translate them into something that can be understood by other people.    

My work's job is to be a pathway for emotion.  It does not need to be identical to my emotion, it can be entirely individual for the person encountering it.  

I remember the moment I became an artist and it was because I had such a strong feeling that I had to  communicate it.  The moment was when I saw my young children playing in the sunshine.  I was overwhelmed by the wonder of watching my children and I painted them.   

I painted my children for about ten years. 

Almost all those paintings sold to people who were not my family.  

I think that it didn't matter who the child was for those people who collected the paintings because the paintings were not specific, they were more about a universal feeling of childhood.

Quilts came into my life early and I continue to make them.  

I like that quilts take a long time to make and seem to hold the lives that whirl around while they are being stitched.  

I like that quilts are used to protect and care for people.

I like that the old patterns tell stories with a secret code.  The strips of cloth in this one look like streaks of lightening.  

The title of the quilt is Thunder and Lightening.  In order to have a good storm you have to have both thunder and lightening, and in order to have a good piece of art, you have to have both art and craft.  

An artist is someone who pays attention and tries to communicate an emotion.  

There are many kinds of artists.

Poets are artists.

Musicians are artists.

Actors are artists.

Painters are artists.

Quilt makers are artists.

I began making quilts when I was twenty years old and I am still making them.

I like that quilts can be abstract. 

I like that quilts can use repetition.  

I like that quilts can look like paintings

I like that quilts can fold up around a body.

I like that they are full of touch.

I studied fine art at university and now have two degrees from two different universities.

I have come to understand the power of moving through art as if you are moving through nature and occasionally I make installations.  The first installation I made is the House with the Golden Windows  shown above.

Sometimes the installations are more about time than space.  

The installation in these photos took three years to make.

I worked the same amount on it every day for three years.

It is called Not to Know But To Go On

My job is to make my work.

My work's job is to awaken other people to their own feelings.  Those feelings inside them, their hopes and dreams and memories as well as the wonder in our beautiful world.  

My job is to show the light.

My work's job is to be the light.