my five minute talk

Thank you to curator, Cathy Masterson and the Homer Watson gallery for taking good care of our work and for this reception today.  Thanks to Tracey Lawko who invited Michaela Fitzsimmons and me to join her this spring at the gallery and have these three separate exhibitions.  Tracey  also organized the bus and we all need to thank her for that.   So many of you have come out on this very rainy day, and that 401 from Toronto is no fun, I really appreciate that many people made the trip.  Thank you.  It's important that art be seen and experienced.  We artists want to communicate what we are thinking about and our unique perspective of the world. 

The Homer Watson House and Gallery is a heritage building, and the room that my work is in is called the Cayley room.  This room has a lovely bay window that gives a natural light to the small intimate space, I imagine it was the front room of the house.  It's not a big room and it has a fireplace and a radiator and a couple of doors that interrupt all the walls.   

Thank you to my husband Ned Martin who build a wooden stand for one of my pieces so that I could show a larger piece than the walls could accommodate and that also allow us to walk around it and see not only the front side but also the back side. 

The two-sided nature of quilts and textiles is what I am concerned with in this exhibition. Quilts are not paintings.  Paintings can be powerful but they communicate with one side and all textiles are double sided.  Think about how we experience a quilt, when you pull it over you; the decorative side on top is what shows, but the side that touches your body is the back side.  Quilts are very much concerned with touch, not only the touch of the maker, but how they touch the body. 

The outside of the textile that shows on the outside or the top of a quilt is only half of it.  The other half of this diptych is the on the inside.

Over the last few years, I've been thinking about the two-sidedness of humans.  What's going on in our other side?  What's going on inside me?  We don't really have a name for this interior space. Is it the spirit? the soul?  It's where memories are, and where dreams are, and ideas are.   

As I turn more and more to hand stitching, it is the inside of  the quilt, the back of it, that has come to represent the inner world to me and has become my primary subject. 

The poet / philosopher, Gaston Bachelard, called the inner world 'the immensity within' in his book the Poetics of Space.  Inside each of us, as we walk around and engage with the so called real world, there is at the same time a part that thinks and dreams and time-travels. 

The imagery in my work in this exhibition is geometric abstraction.  Circles.  Dots, repetitive marks.  The artworks are not meant to represent anything that we see in nature.  I have come to value the place that these shapes give me as I sit quietly with my work in my lap and make marks around or inside the shapes.  They demand that I put just the right amount of concentration into this work.  They allow, in fact they encourage me to go into the space where I access my inner immensity. 

So it is the process of making this pieces that this show is really about, even more than the product that hangs on the walls, and I hope that the feeling of inner-ness is what will come over you as you move slowly through the Cayley room.

Most of the pieces shown in this room for these few months have their insides - out.

All images and text are from the April 30, 2023 reception at the Homer Watson House exhibition.

Inside Out by Judith e Martin.  The exhibit remains open to the public until June 25.