Sunday Sunrise

Seen in the morning. Painted in the afternoon.

Love never dies

All this week I've been writing blog entries for the great lakes town hall. The posts are archived and this link takes you directly to the one I wrote on Tuesday. I think that the other four are right there as well. The whole thing has been a wonderful experience and has renewed my own committment to walk the daily walk of thinking more responsibly about the environment. The experience has also caused me to look again at the great lakes as a whole, and more carefully at my own part of Lake Huron. I'm stunned by nature's beauty, complexity, simplicity, devastating power, vastness.

"You won't be any good until you're dedicated to something outside yourself." from Late Nights on Air by Elizabeth Hay.

a wrapped package

I created this shadow box after reading about Louise Baldwin in an old (2002) Embroidery magazine. I was freshly inspired when I read about her use of collections and how she considers the idea of 'the curator'. Why do we place things on a mantelpiece. What do the odd things collected in boxes, bowls mean? What do we decide to save, what do we decide to throw away? What kind of story happens by placing images and objects next to each other?

Karjalan piirakka

My cousin from Finland brought these traditional pies when he visited on Easter weekend. He's visiting my father and his other cousins now, but four remain and I had one for brunch this morning. Thanks Mika.

Why is it that artists are drawn to work in the quilt medium?

One of the subjects that our youngest daughter is studying at university is craft history. When she was home last month, she chose this quilt of mine to study and has since interviewed me by email and by phone. It was nice for me that it was my own daughter asking questions with critical intent. The essay was due today and I'd like to quote just a few of its 2500 words in this post. The front of the quilt has been made from a single ten meter piece of lightweight cotton fabric hand-dyed by the artist into a rainbow of colours. The design is of two verticals, roughly divided into warm and cool colours. The left panel signifies the husband, while the right panel signifies the wife. While working on the piece the artist discovered that it might be a feminist project. She wrote in her journal at the time that she felt “a rage against being ignored, silenced because I work in craft media. I am a woman, and my work is silenced by my gender. The feminine heart shape, so feminine beautiful and vibrant, is trying to fit into the man's column like shape." Art can change the viewer, and it can change the maker, but it doesn’t always have to be about change. Rather what is really important is that there be communication between the maker and her audience. Textiles are an ideal medium for dealing with inner issues because they have a complex ability to communicate on so many different levels. For Martin, this is achieved through the hand stitching in her quilts. “If you can glimpse a little bit of the maker, than their spirit or soul has come through and it touches you. That’s the 'inner' thing and is one reason why I use so much handwork. People can feel me breathing, and then they realize that they themselves are breathing and that there is a connection here to their own lives. Their inner self connects with my inner self because of this visual language for which there are no words. They are touched by my touching. It is a direct communication. ”

great lakes town hall

I've been invited to be a guest writer on the great lakes town hall all this week. I will be making completely different postings each day than what I'm putting into Judy's Journal, so please click on the link provided, which takes you to one of my photo essays. It's quite an interesting web site all round. At first I felt anxious about what I could possibly say because of the scientific nature of the biodiversity project that this forum is connected to. I am not able to write intelligently about such...any one of my children would be more able. I've decided to put up my artwork. For example, these two separate photo works are from when we first moved to Manitoulin fifteen years ago and found ourselves affected by our view of the big sky and changing water every day. Greek philosophers have taught that everything is water, and water is the basic element in all life.
To know water intimately is to know something about ourselves and to appreciate its pesence as a means for increasing the life of the soul. Thomas Moore

If only I could go back to the beginning where it all began

I really appreciated that Krysta Talenko, curatorial assistant of the Art Gallery of Sudbury, drove two hours (then back again) in order to collect this piece for the gallery's fundraiser next month.

drawing with Eva

I have been reading about Eva Hesse and looking carefully at her drawings and collages. She studied with Josef Albers at Yale when she was twenty. She kept experimenting throughout her brief career, not wanting to retreat into being a student.
These drawings were inspired by one of Eva Hesse's collages.

golden boy

Our son is here for the Easter weekend with a cousin from Finland. It's nice to have them both here.

My own private iceberg, first day of spring

Here are the books I took for participants to browse through at the Power and Beauty workshop in Kingston.

Jessica Bradley and M Teitelbaum The Art of Betty Goodwin
Ivan and Jane Chermayeff C First Shapes
J and P Coats 100 Embroidery Stitches
Mildred Constantine and L.Reuter Whole Cloth
J.C. Cooper An Illustrated Encyclopedia of Traditional Symbols
Lorna Crozier The Blue Hour of the Day: selected poems
Catherine De Zegher, editor Eva Hesse Drawing
Siri Engberg Kiki Smith: A Gathering, 1980 – 2005
Marie Fleming Joyce Wieland
Amandine Guisez Gallienne Colourful World
John Gillow and B. Sentence World Textiles
Mary Gostelow Embroidery: Traditional designs and patterns
Sabrina Ward Harrison Spilling Open: The Art of Becoming Yourself
Mary Hunt Kahlenberg The Extraordinary in the Ordinary
Robert and Judy Kardosh Works on Cloth: Imagery from Baker Lake
Matthew Koumis Art Textiles of the World, Scandinavia
Mary MacCarthy The Crafter’s Pattern Sourcebook
Kathleen Nugent Mangan, ed Lenore Tawney: A retrospective
Ruth McKendry Traditional Quilts and Bed Coverings
Judith Baker Montano Elegant Stitches
Thomas Moore The Re-enchantment of Everyday Life
Anne Morrell The Techniques of Indian Embroidery
Sheila Paine Embroidered Textiles
Sheila Paine Embroidery from India and Pakistan
Sheila Paine Embroidery from Afghanistan
Rachel and Kenneth Pellman The World of Amish Quilts
Doris Shadbolt The Art of Emily Carr
Sue Hammond West Mixed Media Textile Paintings
Susan Goldsmith Wooldridge Poem Crazy: freeing your life with words
Susan G Wooldridge Foolsgold

idea tureen

Job jar approach. Today's word: shells

Reading Rozsika again

Found in Rozsika Parker's 1986 book, The Subversive Stitch, this morning.
In fiction the silence and stillness of the sewer can mean many things from serious concentration to a silent cry for attention, but in terms of the stereotype it is a sexual ploy. If a woman sits silently sewing she is silently asking for the silence to be broken...The manner in which embroidery signifies both self-containment and submission is the key to understanding women's relation to the art.
Well,well. Embroidery is sexy. I knew that.

Our driveway is glare ice

I have been enjoying Lesley Turner's photographs of Indian textile dyeing and block printing. Lesley is a Canadian Opus BA student like me and lives in Calgary. We have not yet met, but know each other because of the internet. Christine Spencer, also at the same Opus level as Lesley and myeself, lives in England. From the look of Chrissy's blog, she's way ahead of me in the course we're both embroiled in right now with our tutor Mary Cozens Walker.
Pictured is the mixed media piece I'm donating to the arthritus society in Sudbury for a fund raiser at the end of the month. Embroidered With Wildness.

cross stitch

I'm indulging in comforting hand stitching. I love the rhythm established by repeating a shape over and over. Pictured above is rayon ribbon floss stitched into cotton velveteen.
This red one is wool yarn stitched into wool fabrics.

Enchanting blue and white world

Last week, Ned and I visited with friends from the Netherlands who are in Canada for six months. Being with them made us notice the natural beauty of a Canadian winter. We now have a renewed appreciation of that mystery just outside our door. This is Indian Falls, near Owen Sound Ontario.

the elm tree

This elm tree represents my childhood for me.

A tree is an active part of its place. It makes that place richer and is an indication of the way something can change a place - in this respect it is a lesson to me about my own life. Andy Goldsworthy

Energy given and received

Everyone seemed pleased by the Power and Beauty workshop. Even me.

Thanks Dad

My father has always been on the cutting edge of technology. We had the first TV in our small community when I was a child. He had a radio set in his car so we could give him messages while he was on the road while I was growing up. He's always provided me with cameras from the age of 16...and computers and scanners after that. His latest gift was an LCD projector so that I would be able to create digital image lectures at home and then show them without the stress of using unfamiliar equipment. I used this projector on Friday here in Kingston, and want to say thanks, Dad.

Pictured here at age 29 with my older brother. photographer unknown.

What kind of life experience is being depicted?

Kingston

We had good weather for the ten hour car trip from Manitoulin to Kingston but now we're here, there's a huge winter storm. There was a good turnout for my talk tonight however, which consisted of a trunk show 'pre-amble' and a LCD projector 'amble'. Symbolism is what has kept me hooked on making these flags for the bed (as Margaret Atwood calls quilts). The symbols and the beautiful traditional patterns...one and the same.

Cloth to stitch.

Dyed and overdyed linen, cotton and rayon fabrics sorted and bagged for this weekend's workshop. This is the first time I have presented the Power and Beauty workshop, and am a little jittery about it. Hilary Scanlan, the organizer of Fibreworks in Kingston asked me to 'Just let us know you. Show us how you begin, where you get your ideas from.' That sounds easy enough, but it's not. It's easy to show people how to do a contour drawing or how to do curved piecing. It's easy to show children how to play a major scale. It's not so easy to show where ideas come from. Maybe I'm bringing dyed fabrics because ideas sometimes come from the materials themselves.

dye and over dye

Pictured is a quilt back that I just over dyed red. Much improved, it used to be green, orange and purple. Also shown are two pieces of hankerchief linen dyed red for my my class in Kingston this weekend. This fabric is so lovely and soft. I also tried tea-dyeing it with great results.

exhausted

My heart, like a hand and its fingers

How she submitted
Loved
Loved her interior world
Her interior wilderness
That primal forest inside her where among decayed tree trunks
Her heart stood
Light green

by Rainer Maria Rilke
paraphrased by moi to allow for the female pronoun, rather than the male

Inner Self Revealed

Three ideas inform my work at this time. Emptiness. Isolation. Nature.

hand crafted gift

My daughter and her friend left this morning for Montreal. We had a lovely visit. A quiet week.

This paper cut is by April Martin