Mary Pratt and me

I own four books about the Canadian artist Mary Pratt including the newest one by Anne Koval, a biography that I am enjoying very much. 

The biography is an easy to read narrative that examines how an artist's personal life is mixed up with the art she creates.  Each chapter selects works by the artist that chronologically travel through her life story and also mirror Pratt’s emotional and lived experience.  The book also shows how a woman with a strong creative need really has to believe in herself and have determination if she is to be seen and taken seriously as an artist when there is a large family in her life.

I learned many things about Mary Pratt in this book.  One thing is that she believed, like most people of her era, that a woman's purpose was to marry young and have a family.  Born in 1935, she was 22 years old when she married Christopher in 1957.  By age 30, she had four children.  

I also like the Koval biography because it talks about how Mary managed to do it all.  She took care of her husband who was quite moody.  She took care of the children.  She hosted her in-laws nearly every weekend.  She seemed (from all the paintings in evidence) to have a beautiful home.  And, all through it, she participated in art exhibitions.  Although she eventually had a room of her own, her early work was made in various rooms with a portable easal and a rolling cart with her paints on it.    

Salmon on Saran by Mary Pratt

Mary Pratt came to Kenora, the town where I lived, in 1991.  She was to speak to artists about her work.  The event was sponsored by Visual Arts Ontario and was hosted by the Lake of the Woods museum.  The museum put on an exhibition of local artists and I made a needlebook complete with needles.  I sewed clipped sections from printed knitting patterns to the felt pages.  I thought it was interesting that the knitting pattern-language (k 1 , p 1, k 1, p 1) is a secret code that mostly only women understand.  

My friend Barbara worked for the museum and Mary was to stay overnight at her home on the lake.  Barbara hosted a dinner for all the VAO people who accompanied Mary.  I remember helping Barb with the meal and also attending it. It was lovely. What an honour to be invited. 

Jelly Shelf by Mary Pratt

At the talk she gave the next day, Mary Pratt spoke about how the feminist movement helped her work  to be seen.  In 1975, she was curated by Mayo Graham into an exhibiiton at the National gallery of Canada entitled Some Canadian Women Artists.  Feminists saw psychological meanings in her paintings of fish cut open on tin foil, and fruit contained in glass bowls or jars.  Mary might have perceived a darker underlying meaning, but she claims that she chose these subjects because of their sensuality.  In her talk, she said that it was the surface of things that she was in love with.  She wants her viewers to gasp when we look at her work because of how our body responds.  Anne Koval uses the word erotic to describe how Mary Pratt chooses her subjects.  

Cod on Foil by Mary Pratt

However, Anne Koval has also included several chapters that show how the paintings are metaphors.  An example is the chapter about the several wedding dress paintings Mary Pratt did in the mid 80's.  The artist is quoted as saying that the paintings were about the "important business of a woman giving herself to a man.  It's a traumatic event.  Giving is something women do."  

Wedding Dress by Mary Pratt

I remember her standing upright at the front of the room in Kenora, wearing a dark dress, quite frail.  She had a microphone in her hand, and her slides were projected on a screen behind her.  She sat beside me both before and after her lecture.  During the refreshments we continued our visit and I told her that I had four kids too.  She asked me if I was an artist and I gushed and babbled about the solo show I was to have that fall in Thunder Bay.  I don't remember much except how much awe I had for her.  I was 39 at the time, and she was 65.  She told me she wanted to buy Needlebook.  I said that I would give it to her.

Mary Pratt gave me a word of advice.  "Always photograph your work when its finished. Have large transparencies, not just ordinary slides taken.  Find a professional photographer who will take care of these things.  Pay the money, because when they want to write a book about you, they will need good images, and this is how you will have them."  

I began to follow that advice, and am continuing to this day.   

After the symposium, I mailed her my needlebook.  I also sent some slides of my work so that she could see them.  She had a hip replacement that summer and her reply didn't come for several months.  I've framed her letter to me and it hangs in my studio.

Goldenrod dye

This is a record of what I did to process wild goldenrod from the ditches and fields of Manitoulin into a brilliant yellow or gold dye on cellulose (linen and cotton) materials.  The method I use takes days.  My bible was Sara Buscaglia's book, Quilt Alchemy.   The fabrics were scoured, soaked in tannin, mordanted in alum, and finally dyed in a liquid made from cooking goldenrod flowers or goldenrod leaves and stems.  I'm sharing what I did because it might be helpful to others, but please remember that I am not an expert. I learn something new every time I do this.  

September 13.  Gather the wild material.  Ned and I had a lovely afternoon, driving the back roads of this beautiful, rural place.

September 14.  Separate the flowers from the green stems and leaves. 

September 15.  Cover the plant material with boiling water and allow to steep overnight.

September 16  Simmer the plant mixture for one hour.  Allow to steeep 8 hours. Repeat two more times.  

September 17:  Continue to simmer and steep.  I had four large cauldrens going, taking turns on my kitchen stove.  Two with just flowers and two others with only leaves and stems.  It takes days to extract the colour fully.  Some say that you can over cook the flowers and make the colour dull.  Maybe I did, I'm not sure.  

September 18:  Meanwhile, prepare the fabrics by scouring them.  To scour linen, immerse in hot water that has one tablespoon of liquid soap and two teaspoons of soda ash per cauldren.  Simmer for one hour and then allow to cool in the liquid.  Rinse.  I prepared six linen damask table cloths for the first strike of dye.  

September 19:   Mix tannin solutions.  This important step is what helps the cellulose accept the colour.  I used powders from Maiwa for this step.  Myrobalan, Henna, and a Tannin that I bought twenty five years ago and never used.  The Myrobalan gave a yellow tone to the cloth, the Henna gave an yellow-orange tone to the cloth and the 'tannin' gave a pink-tan tone.     

I made six buckets of tannin pre-soak in total, two of each type.  I only put one table cloth into each pail because it is important not to over-crowd.  Recipe: I used 4 talblespoons of tannin powder and 1.5 tablespoons of soda ash in a 2.5 gallon bucket of hot tap water (a stronger solution perhaps than I needed).  Immerse scoured, rinsed, and wrung out cloth into the pail.  Make sure there are no air bubbles and the fabric is under the surface.  Allow to cool,  steep over night.

September 20:  Mix alum mordant solutions.  4 tablespoon alum (potassium) and 2 tablespoon soda ash in larger bucket (5 gallon) of hot water.  Stir.  I made three alum buckets.  By this time I had a dozen pots and pails in total.  Thank goodness that it was beautiful weather and I could work on the deck.

Have a pail of luke warm water handy, and rinse the tannin-treated cloth in the clear water before wringing it out and putting it into the alum mordant.  When recipes say to soak two hours or overnight, I always do the overnight option because this is very physical work and my body just need a break.

September 21: Time to dye!  For the first time in my dyeing with natural dyes, I didn't heat the colour.  I just strained the flowers off and filled two buckets with dye colour made from flowers only.  After rinsing the alum soaked cloth, I immersed it inito the dye, and pushed out all the air pockets that might make it float to the top.  I left them to steep overnight along with the buckets of leaf and stem colour. 

September 22:  I wrung out the table cloths without rinsing and put them on the line.   Meanwhile, I had discovered a large stack of already scoured cotton and linen.  It was soaking in the bath tub, and this day was spent re-charging the tannin buckets and adding these fabrics to them.  

It is necessary to re-charge the tannin after each use.  Recipe: heat up the solution on the stove to the temperature of hot tap water, and then add 1.5 tablespoons of tannin powder and 1 heaping tsp soda ash.  You can re-use your tannin three times.  

flowers only in first six pieces, stems and leaves in the furthest away four pieces

September 23:  I left my fabrics on the line overnight and then put them through the dryer so that I could fold them up without worrying about dampness.  I didn't rinse or wash, but i did dry them.  I usually leave my cloth a month to allow the colour to cure.  

When that much time has passed or when I am ready to use it, I wash it with synthropol liquid soap. 

September 24 and 25:  I continued re-charging the tannin pre-soaks and also the alum mordant pails.  To recharge alum, heat up the liquid and add 30 percent of the powders.

After processing cotton and linen fabrics, I began working with (protein) wool and silk fabrics. Protein fabrics do not need the tannin pre-soak, but the advice is that they do need the alum to be brightest.  

In the evening of September 25, I hung the wool and silk fabrics on the line and Ned and I then disposed of the tannins and the dye liquids.  They were exhausted by now and the colour was becoming pale. 

I have a lot of yellow fabric now.  I hope to create green with some of it by overdyeing with indigo. 

Brent Wadden: Untitled (pink/grey)

Untitled (pink / grey) by Brent Wadden  Handwoven fibres, 79 x 71" 2015

Brent Wadden was born in Glace Bay, Nova Scotia, in 1979.

If you look him up on the internet, he comes up as Brent Wadden painter.  His BFA degree from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (NSCAD) is in painting.  "Friends commented on how much my work resembled textiles or how it would translate very easily into a weaving, and that planted a seed"  so that when he saw an exhibition of vintage Morrocan rugs in 2010 it "totally blew my mind".  The large weavings were hung vertically on the wall rather than flat on the floor,  and Wadden was drawn into the psychedelic nature of the lines and patterns.  He liked "how the patterns and colours just started and stopped randomly"  At the time Wadden was living and working in Berlin, Germany and the artist-weaver Travis Meinolf lived nearby.  Meinolf kindly started Brent with some yarn, a back strap loom, and rudimentary lessons.  It wasn't long before a hybrid artform of woven fibres assembled and then  mounted on stretched canvas became Brent Wadden's primary medium. 

He has had many solo exhibitions in Europe and in North America.  He uses second hand yarns and threads, and concentrates on large jagged abstract forms.  This focus on form melds the aesthetic gender and status roles associated with craft and abstraction.  The resulting paintings have both a structural life and a planar presence.  (Mitchell-Innes and Nash art gallery)

Brent Wadden now divides his time between Vancouver Canada and Berlin Germany.  

Further Sources:  Emergent magazine , Pace Gallery, and the book Cloth :100 Artists by Lena Corwin

Number five of  Canadian Artists who work with Textiles.

Slow Work

 

cloudy day

Sophie Anne Edwards interviewed me last month at the Art Gallery of Sudbury.  To prepare for the interview Sophie sent me questions the day before, and I wrote answers.  

During the actual interview, we didn't refer to our notes, and the conversation was quite casual and spontaneous. However, for this blogpost, I am sharing one of the questions Sophie sent me as well as my written answer.  

Island Heart

Question:      There is a deep care in your work, in the process, the slowness, the time of a life and the time of each stitch. I know people realize that fibre/quilting is slow work, but you work slowly in different ways (in some ways you work quite quickly in terms of volume). To me this slow stance is a radical resistance: to the pressures of capitalist logics of productivity and consumption. Your work challenges what we understand as fine art, and not just because you’re working very finely with a historically feminine practice, but because your work uplifts and forefronts what is historically downplayed (the feminine, the domestic); but also because we are so pressured to work quickly, to be productive in a way that is visible, consumable, implicated in the circulations of capital. The quilts aren’t easily consumed – they don’t give the whole story away, we don’t know all of your thoughts, some text is invisible, or only partially visible, the works are large, they can’t all be seen in one eyeful, one must walk around and through them, they aren’t reproducible, and as large works they are often not sold in the way that other art work is sold.

 

• Would you speak to how you move between the art ‘industry’ as a professional artist, and your commitment to slow, highly detailed work?

 

Answer

One thing that I want to say is that I studied classical piano as a child.  Classical music requires practice, a tedious thing for many people to do and they quit, but I did the practicing, not always with the greatest concentration, but I set the timer and I did it.  I think that the discipline of music practice may have made me able to do my slow work today.   I still use a timer, although I no longer play the piano.  My aim when I was preparing a Mozart sonata for an exam was to make it sound as if it was easy and that is why I practiced.   I wanted to communicate easily to my listener – and it’s the same with my quilts.  I want my viewers to ‘get’ my work intuitively and I think that they do because of the amount of time and touch held within the quilts.  My heart is there for them in an open and powerful simplicity. It’s emotional.  

poet in love

Giving one’s attention requires one to slow down.  Durational time like this requires me to stay with a project long enough to understand what it is doing and what I am feeling.  The viewer also has to slow down.   For me, going slowly allows my intuition more space to guide me through the uncertainty.  It’s important to me that the work is open to change and doubt and the piece is constantly evolving and in the process becomes more true.  

Also, working slowly with cloth, touching it as much as I stitch it, gives me ideas.  My imagination has permission and enough space to soar.  Thoughts come through the sense of touch. More ideas than we can understand or process –

my heart and eternity

Maybe what you mean by the art industry is the commercial art scene of galleries and art fairs.  

You know, I think that my work could fit into this just fine, because my work is authentic and true and beautiful and well made.  It’s true that it is not made to ‘sell’, but I think that people do eventually find that it is decorative and thought provoking enough for their homes.  It is not 'normal' though in the commercial gallery system.  Quilted textiles are against the grain. My simple abstract work is not group of 7 type landscape.  I like to think it is more like the early modernists like Paul Klee in the 20’s and Mark Rothko in the 50’s but with feeling in many senses of the word. 

Textile art in general is marginalized in the fine art world.    It’s looked upon as a woman’s art, and even though there are more women artists now there is still resistance to our art.  Quilts have an even tougher time of it, perhaps.  Sometimes, this does get me down, but most of the time I can’t care about this aspect.  I can't worry about whether my work is written about or collected.  Because all I care about really, is making it.  

I know that quilts are art.  

...........................................................................................................................................................

This is just one of the eight questions Sophie sent me.  I can share another one in a future post.  In regards to the actual August 23 interview, I hope to be able to share it either by video or audio within the next few weeks.    

The Immensity Work

the cloud in me in the outdoor gallery

Immensity is within ourselves.  It is attached to a sort of expansion of being that life curbs and caution arrests, but which starts again when we are alone.”    Gaston Bachelard   The Poetics of Space.

These pieces from 2017 seem empty, but are in actuality filled with textural small marks put there one at a time with hand stitch.  I’ll never be finished with exploring the immensity within.    

longing cloth

longing cloth (verso)

 Longing Cloth 

I feel that yearning is our strongest emotion, more powerful than love itself.  I used indigo dyed velvet because it is such a sensual fabric to touch and a bright red inner layer, revealed by cutting away some of the cloth in the reverse of the piece. 

the cloud in me

 Luce Irigaray’s book To be Two  has a section about women and men and how each has a unique and huge interior life. 

"Each remote from the other, we are kept alive by an insuperable gap.  Nothing can ever fill it.  Is it because I do not know you that I know you are?  How do I protect without restraining?  You remain a mystery to me.  Our union will always remain a mystery.  Such is the union between woman and man.  I want to live in harmony with you and still remain other.  I want to draw nearer to you while protecting myself from you.  In which part of myself do I preserve you?  In which breath?  

How do I remain without suffocating? How do I make earth out of air and protect the cloud in me?  Neither mine nor yours but each living and breathing with the other.  What makes me one, and perhaps unique, is that you are, and I am not you.” 

I had to do some reflecting this past week because I'm being interviewed by Sophie Anne Edwards at the Art Gallery of Sudbury on Saturday and I remembered the thesis for my Fine Art degree from Middlesex University and the work that came from that.  

Grow your own heart

How do you grow your own heart?

When we feel and support our own happiness, we are nourishing our ability to love.

You can't offer happiness to another until you have it youself.

Learn to love and heal yourself, then you have something to offer others.  

Thich Nhat Hanh

Images of one of the quilts I've been growing my heart with this summer.  In progress.

Joyce Wieland: I Love Canada ~ J'Aime Le Canada

 Joyce Wieland :  I Love Canada ~ J'Aime Le Canada

Joyce Wieland  (1930-1998) is considered to be one of Canada's most prominent and prolific artists. 

The youngest of three children, she was born in Toronto, Canada to English emigrants who died when Joyce was quite young.  Brought up by her siblings, she attended high school at Central Tech in Toronto and was mentored by artist Doris McCarthy, who taught there.  She began her work career in film animation and met artist Michael Snow, marrying him when she was 26.  In 1960, (age 30) and then again in 1962, she had solo shows in two separate Toronto commercial galleries.  1962 is also the year that she and Michael moved to New York and lived there for nine years.  While in the USA, she became more aware of politics and of her deep love for  her home country, Canada.  When Pierre Elliot Trudeau became prime minister in 1968, she celebrated that by giving him a bed sized quilt, inspired by his mantra, Reason Over Passion.  Read more information about this two part piece that mixes the personal and the political at this link.   Wieland and Snow moved back to Canada in 1971 in time for her to mount her solo exhibition, "True Patriot Love" at the National Gallery of Canada. The exhibition included quilts and paintings, most about the fragile arctic and expressing a deep love for Canada.  Joyce's older sister Joan Stewart along with friends and volunteers joined with Joyce to sew the quilts she designed for this ground-breaking exhibition.  

I Love Canada ~ J'Aime Le Canada    cloth, thread, batting, metal.  Joan Stewart did the quilting and the embroidery.        1970   collection of Mackenzie Art Gallery, Regina, Canada. 

"Wieland believed that Canada had to extricate itself from US encroachment.  Subverting the myth of a peaceful, tolerant, caring, and just Canada, the small embroidered letters in the middle read:  "Death to U.S. Technological Imperialism" in both official languages.   Wieland's progressive vision of Canadian society saw anglophones and francophones reconciled.  she declared in a 1971 New York Times article "I'm a Canadian.  I believe in Canada.  We should work for Canadian unity - English and French - as Canadians, not as anti-Americans.  We should be more positive about ourselves."

Joyce Wieland is being honoured by a full career retrospective in 2025.  It showed in Montreal in the first half of the year and in Toronto at the art gallery of Ontario in the second half.  There is a catalogue available entitled Heart On.  

Number 4 of Canadian Artists Who Work With Textiles  

Toronto visit

Tomorrow is Another Day, indigo in linen damask, applique, hand stitching, 2024

I’m in Toronto this week.  I arrived on Friday and spent  two nights (Friday and Saturday) at the Gladstone House on Queen West.  I was able to do this fancy thing because part of the Gladstone House Award that I won last fall was one night's sleep in the room where my work is hanging for one year.  (The second night was half price).  My linen wall piece will be in room 309 until November.  After those two nights, I moved to the east end of the city where my son lives with his family.   

Our daughter April lives in the west end of the city, and on that first Saturday she took me to several commercial galleries.  First up was the Patel Brown gallery where there was a group show What We Carry.  The handmade washi paper sculptures of Japanese-Canadian artist, Alexa Kumiko Hatanaka resonated with me.  She made sewn boulders and 3-dimensional wall pieces from lino block printed paper that she had made herself.   

At the same gallery, we saw some pieces by Swapnaa Tamhane 

Bird's Eye mirror embroidery on dyed silk by Swapnaa Tamhane

Fence watercolour on paper  by Swapnaa Tamhane

I feel so lucky to have been able to see these inspirational, quilt-like pieces that reference place (her ancestral homeland) so eloquently.  

We visited the Clint Roenisch gallery next and I saw Leif Low-Beer's solo exhibition of naive sculptures and paintings done in pastels and bright colours in a variety of mediums.  

S.E.T.M. 1 2025 

In the Daniel Faria gallery, Jean-Francois Lauda's solo exhibition,  Some Exceeding Twelve Minutes, was on display. All the paintings had this as their name, differentiated by a number. 

S.E.T.M. 5     2025

Jean-Francois Lauda is a practicing musician, and the title, Some Exceeding Twelve Minutes refers to the time that performances of musical pieces stretches to be longer than usual or expected.  I liked that time is considered a material in these paintings.  The artist says that he enjoys "staying with something long enough to understand what it's doing or undoing".  

I tried to understand why Lauda's work resonated with me so much, and I think it is because his paintings are similar to my own work (in textiles).  Like my work, his paintings a) are nearly monochromatic and b) there are large areas of 'empty space filled with textural marks".

Window   2017. Oil on canvas 

The last gallery that we visited on Saturday was MOCA - the Museum of Contemporary Art.  I had looked forward to viewing the solo shows of Jessica Stockholder and Justin Ming Yong, but was not as impressed as I had hoped to be by them.  However, Margaux Williamson's extensive exhibition entitled Shoes, books, hands, buildings and cars was really good. There were a lot of paintings, several of them dated 2025.  Most were very large.  On large neutral backgrounds, she represents the familiar interiors and backyards of her life in a diaristic way.  Her compositions explore abstraction, a variety of perspectives, unfinished areas, and contemporary dailiness.  

Red Carpet (collection of the art gallery of Ontario) 2024

I've followed Margaux Williamson's career for a while, beginning from when I read Sheila Heti’s 2010 novel grounded in their personal friendship, How Should a Person Be?   However, this is the first time that I have been able to view her paintings in real life and it was astounding to be face to face with her masterly technique and the large scale of the paintings.  

The final artist I will speak about is my grand daughter, Suvi, age 4.  She used finger paint on finger painting paper in these morning paintings about the sun, but (such a rebel) she used a paint brush to apply the paint.  (except for that red finger-painted circle in the painting on the upper left.)