With a big sky and with elm trees

My coming-of-age time (13 or so).

I'm the one in the aqua coat and no boots.

I grew up in North Western Ontario, ten miles west of Fort Frances.  It was a flat area, with reasonable land for farming.  My father built our home and continued to build it for my whole childhood, often moving rooms or stairwells while I was at school.  He was born in Finland and immigrated to this area of Northern Ontario with his mother when he was 5 years old.  I am very proud to be 50 percent Finnish.  I feel that the aesthetic of noble poverty and simplicity and love of lakes and nature is part of that culture and is evident in Finnish design.  My mother was born in Fort Frances, and married my father when she was a school teacher in a rural school.  She loved elegance and made her own clothes using Vogue patterns.  She loved literature, especially Virginia Woolf, and she loved learning, teaching herself French from reading mystery novels, and psychology through distance education.  She had allergies and had to take needles for them when I was growing up.  She was very shy and so we never went anywhere or had anyone over to our house.  I felt isolated and wanted to get out of there, move to a city, see art and movies and interesting people.  I wanted to go to university and study literature or art.  On the other hand, my mother’s love for culture meant that there was good literature in the house all the time and lots of magazines and art supplies for us to use.  I took piano lessons and got quite far in the Royal conservatory exams.  You can see the landscape in the background – the horizon and the sky and the elm trees, there is an especially beautiful and large beautiful tree just out of sight in this photo, at the corner of our driveway and the highway.  There was a long bus ride east towards the high school in town or west when we were younger to the new public school in Devlin.  

I believe that our childhood and youth inform our creative work more than we realize.  Early in my career I read Originals by Eleanor Munro, a book of interviews of American women artists. Munro always asked the artists about their childhood landscape and time and again, that landscape would appear in some way in their mature art.

My childhood landscape was one of isolation and emptiness.  

With a big sky and creative parents.  With elm trees and a highway and a sister and a brother.  

Mended Rail Fence

 One of my projects at the cottage was mending this rail fence quilt that I made in 1976. 

The fabrics were newly purchased especially for this piece.  I've had to replace some of the worn out cottons and I've used mostly velvet to do so.  

Usually I did the work in bed before going to sleep.  I worked with the reading light on my side of the bed.  It was a quiet and nourishing thing for me to do after a busy day.

I grandmothered during the day time.  Sometimes the grandmothering resembled patchwork.

We had a fam-jam on Canada Day. 

The big news for this year is that our oldest took ownership of her great uncle's cottage.  It’s quite near the  main one.    

This quilt was originally made as a wedding gift for my sister, the second quilt I ever made.  I look forward to returning it to her as she celebrates 50 years with her guy.  

quilts on show in the outdoor gallery

Sunflower Sky

Sky With Many Moons

The Beauty of the  Green Earth

Lake Full of Stars

Trembling Heart

Field of Light

Mothering Bundles

I live in a beautiful place.  I am so grateful to be here and to be able to keep doing this quilting gig.  The quilts pictured here among the cedar trees near the water are my part of the exhibition currently installed at the Craft Ontario gallery in Toronto, Canada alongside ten other quilts by my artist daughter, April.  It’s my birthday today and I am celebrating all these things.  

I`m 75.

I`m alive.

that`s my poem for today.  xo

our mother-daughter exhibition

 April and I began installing our exhibition today.

We have put together a mother-daughter show of new hand stitched quilts. 

Earlier and Later is the title we chose for it.  

The curator, Robyn Wilcox, figured out the placement.  My husband Ned was first assistant.

April's quilts dance into a future.  My quilts are steeped in my personal history.  April and I are part of a long tradition of creativity, women makers, and the passing on of skills. It's exciting for the two of us to be showing together at the Craft Ontario gallery in the city of Toronto.  I'm very proud of her and of our rich relationship.  

The opening reception is in one week in the early evening of  June 18.  Our joint talk with the curator is on June 20 at 2 pm.  

The Beauty of the Green Earth,
 hand stitched quilt, Tree Everlasting pattern
 by Judy Martin 2026

in relation to an inlet

My quilts are objects that come together from materials I can touch, but also from some kind of fantasy of what I hope and dream yet can not name.  

Slow to make, with many repetitive tasks that put me into a meditative state, they are listeners for the things I can’t say out loud in my normal life.  

When I made my first quilts, and even later, after I had been going along for years, I had a fantasy.  

My fantasy was about my own work.  I thought it was unusual.  

I thought that it was creative.  I knew that it was art.

But when I look now at what has been done and continues to be done by the giants of this immense world, I realize that my work is rather ordinary.  This realization does not mean that I am going to slow down or stop making it.  And it doesn't mean that I am going to stop having the fantasy that what I'm making is something new and true and different.  

It only means that I realize that I'm a speck, and that it is a big world.  

“I’m sorry for forgetting how small I was in relation to an inlet.  

  Every day is a last day, and it is more than enough.  Max Porter 

Maria Hupfield : Jingle Spiral

Maria Hupfield was born in Parry Sound, Ontario, Canada in 1975.  She works across disciplines such as video, performance, and industrial felt.  After ten years of living in Brooklyn, NY, Maria has returned to Canada, and resides in Toronto. She identifies as an urban Anishinaabe who belongs to the Wasauksing First Nation (Huron Robinson Treaty) in Ontario.

Jingle Spiral (2015) (pictured above) references the Ojibwe sacred powwow dress.  Such dresses feature hundreds of metal cones that creae a soothing sound when the dancer moves.  In her 2017 exhibition at the Power Plant in Toronto, Jingle Spiral was presented mounted on the wall as well as in a performance video. Watch the video at this link.

Maria Hupfield is assistant professor in Indigenous Performance and Media Art at the University of Toronto in Mississauga where she runs the Indigenous Creation Studio and is also the Director and Lead Arrtist in the Department of Visual Studies / English and Drama.  As well, she works with graduate students at the St. George Campus of U of T.  Hupfield states:  "My research brings together studio based practices and processes with expansive definitions of art that are informed by knoweldge from nations connected to the campus in the Great Lakes region."  

Maria Hupfield is number 9 in the Canadian Arists who work with Textiles series.  

as if we were all immortal

There is a room in Paris filled with the lady and unicorn tapestries.  I thought about it the other day when I came across an old journal entry.    I’m sorry that now I’ve misplaced those exact words, but maybe I can get the essence here.  

The famous unicorn tapestries are in The Musee de Cluny, a haven within the busy centre of Paris.  Last year when I visited Paris with our middle daughter, we looked in the gift store of this museum for two matching pillows, each with a unicorn done in needlepoint for her twin toddlers.

I took a few photos of the tapestries and am sharing them here.  The now lost journal entry was about hope and the human spirit and how the handmade object is an expression of resilliance.    

These tapestries are so old, yet there is something forever young about them.  

as if we were all immortal in some way

ourselves enormous

in the plumed fields of light are the shapely deeds of our flesh

what grandeur

                 (words by Al Purdy, Canadian poet)

Click this link to view Rebecca Mezoff's visit to the Cluny museum in 2019.  She describes and gives images of each of the tapestries.   

Lonesome Dove

Been thinking about the blog again.  About why I write it?

And why it seems so important to me to share it?

The first question:  Why do you write this blog, Judy?

The answer:  I write it in order to have a record of when (and sometimes how) I made my quilts.  This is why I show my work in process.  The beautiful process of stitching is shown so well in the photos.  The more difficult process of designing a new piece is something that I also try to write about, but that struggle is not as beautiful.  

I write the blog so that my creative process is recorded.  

The second question:  Why is it so important to share your blog with the world, Judy?  For two years now, you've been sending out monthly emails to remind people that you've posted.  Why do you care that other people see your process?  

Actually, this question is what I have been thinking about the most. 

I started sending the email update newsletters because the main auto-subscribe service that I had listed my blog with told me that they would stop working.  So, I thought that it would be easy for me to just let people know with a monthly email.  In the same email, I could let people know that I have a design blog (my process) and a news blog (judy's updates) that are regularly updated.  Why?  

My kids advised me to start a substack instead, and eventually I did so.  It's called Judy's Newsletter, and right now, it is just a repeat of the monthly blog letter.  

But why mom?  

Answer:  I want to share this blog with you because it is about taking care of myself.  I make these quilts to take care of myself.  I share them with the world in exhibitions because I think that there is no other artform that is quite so motherly as a quilt. 

I want people to read the blog and feel inspired to start creating.  That's why I share it.

And I send the emails to people who are not interested in starting further social platforms like instagram and like substack.  I have a lot of those kinds of readers.

Judy's Journal is now in its 21st year of publication.  That's a long time.  I do celebrate that.  I am not tired of writing about my work, and showing photos of the works as they progress.  I might be getting tired of the monthly emails though.  Judy's Newsletter is free on Substack.   

   

Images in this post are of three new pieces that I am getting ready for an exhibition in Toronto this summer.  I've been listening to the very long and beautifully written novel, Lonesome Dove , while stitching.