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.)    

Poem

Day and night come hand in hand like a boy and a girl pausing only to eat wild berries out of a dish painted with pictures of birds.

They climb the high ice-covered mountain, then they fly away.  

But you and I don't do such things.

We climb the same mountain; 

I say a prayer for the wind to lift us but it does no good; you hide your head so as not to see the end..

Downard and downward and downward and downward is where the wind is taking us.

I try to comfort you but words are not the answer; I sing to you as mother sang to me.

Your eyes are closed. 

We pass the boy and girl we saw at the beginning; now they are standing on a wooden bridge;

I can see their house behind them;

How fast you go they call to us, but no, the wind is in our ears, that is what we hear....

And then we are simply falling....

And the world goes by, all the worlds, each more beautiful than the last;

I touch your cheek to protect you.

Poem by Louise Gluck

Murmuration

murmuration 

This is a post about a new quilt top, murmuration.  I want to write about the process and how it made me feel as I machine pieced pinwheels from silk samples that were given to me by my daughter April and her friend, Em J, who works in film costuming. 

I want to write about how I let this obsession happen and how I loved that it happened.  I was in a rare place of creativity and had to keep sewing and pinning to the wall until finished.  

I used silly rules things like having to sew the four half square triangle blocks of a pinwheel together when I ran out of pins and then eventually having to sew two pinwheels together when I ran out of pins again.

And I want to tell you how I used my body, not my mind, (unless it was my mind that made up the limits and rules). For example I didn't let myself change the size of the gifted strips of cloth.  If they were 5 1/2 inches wide, I left them that size and therefore had to pair them with another strip the same size.  Eventually, when I was forced by to change colour, I would trim the larger piece, and that is why there are smaller triangles.  They are the trimmings from the wider strips.                    

I also added some pieces from my own supply of shot silks, but chose not to have any reds or yellows in order keep to the rather sombre palette in the original fabrics.  

Usually when I work I turn the phone timer to one hour but for the ten days that it took me to do this piecework, I turned it to two hours at a time.  Even then, time went by so quickly.

And yet, physically, I tried to slow everything down.  I used my body and moved a fair amount for each step.  I cut the four squares needed for a pinwheel at my cutting board and then marked them carefully with the diagonal lines for seams and then I would walk around the table to my sewing machine and sew them together and cut them.  Then I had to get up and go to the iron in order to press them flat, and then walk into another room to the pinwall and place them.  Then I sat for a while in my chair and look at it all, eventually getting up to go back to the cutting board to cut out two more sets of squares.  My rules said that they had to be a different pair than the previous time which made it interesting for me.  My point is that I did not try to cut a whole bunch of squares at one time, or do any chain piecing, or iron everything at the same time.  Each block was done one at a time and then looked at.  Regarded. It was like painting with my body and the sewing machine and the iron and those beautiful silks.

I wanted to tell you this thing about moving my body more than I needed to because of the feeling that it was necessary to slow down the machine sewing.  I used the wall as if it was a piece of paper or canvas and worked by intuition in that arbitrary placement.  I was obsessed with getting the whole thing finished though, because of the placement.  It wasn’t as if I could just pile up the blocks and put them in a drawer, I had to finish it in the one go.  At least that's how it felt.  Urgent.

When I finished I put my coat and boots on and took my cane so that I could manage my way down the gentle slope that was deep in drifted snow and pinned the sewn assemblage on the line I have there, down in the cedars.  

It had snowed three or four inches overnight and the east morning light was delightful on the moving lake.  

Now I've chosen a backing cloth from the silk fabric that my instagram friend, Fabia, gifted me earlier this year (two shades of gold), and I will hand stitch this not-square shape.

I love that it is shaped like a cloud and I may make another.  

The thing is, I thought I'd lost this almost erotic passion of losing myself in creativity for such a long period.  I realized that I was in that rare place where reality was outside of me. I was in a dream world and I knew it.  I was in another place.  I was aware of this and I loved it.

It's hard to write this so it makes sense, but maybe you understand.  

I think you do.  

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!  
 

and this quilt it is so safe

Kindness is our only hope.

We were with our family in a Mexican resort during that unreal time between Christmas and New Year's.  We had a very beautiful escape.  

I took my handwork with me and there were moments of quiet when I turned to it, mostly in the early evenings in our very clean and white room when it was a relief to be away from the sun.

I am pleased to finally be able to share on this blog that I have been invited to mount a solo show at the Festival of Quilts in Birmingham England this coming August.  For the exhibition, I plan to finish up the quilt tops I put together during the pandemic so that I can display mostly all new work.  And this is one of them.

Quilting it surprised me.  When I hand piece a quilt, I usually need to strengthen the seams by quilting them 'in the ditch' and that is the case here.  However, this is the first time that I have added a secondary grid and that simple stitching made the old damasks express a softness that I had not expected.  

It became a quiet safety net full of PEACE.

A traditional one patch quilt has a timeless quality, not innovative or risky.  Quilts like this make me think about my 50 year marriage to Ned.  We celebrated it in Mexico with our children and there were many speeches and teasing about our long marriage and one of the kids asked me what my favourite thing about being married to Ned over the years and my answer  was that I felt safe with him.  

I'm a timid person. It's a scary world and I am afraid of it.  

And this quilt.  It is so safe.  

and my love is poured.

Our world goes to pieces. We have to rebuild our world.  We investigate and worry and analyze and forget that the new comes about through exuberance, not through a defined deficiency. We have to find our strength rather than our weakness.  Out of the chaos of collapse we can save the lasting: we still have our right or wrong; the absolute of our inner voice.  We still know beauty.  We still know freedom and happiness, unexplained and unquestioned.  Intuition saves us examination.  We have to gather our constructive energies and concentrate on the little we know, the few remaining constants.  But how?  We neglect a training in experimenting and doing.  We feel safer as spectators.  We collect rather than construct.  We are proud of knowledge but forget that facts only give reflected light.  If we want to learn to do, we have to turn to artwork, more specifically to craft work.  We learn that no picture exists before it is done.  The conception of a work gives only its temper, not its consistency.  Things take shape in material and in the process of working it.  Anni Albers

two trees at fifty years

Ned and I celebrated our 50 years married at a resort in Mexico over New Year's.  Our four children and their families celebrated with us.    

There were eighteen in our party. It was a blast and I am so very thankful.

A note about the t-shirts we are wearing in this beach photo.  Created as a surprise for us, the youngsters marched into our room in a large group and they each wore a t-shirt.  The one year old twins, the school age sisters, the teen boys, the adults in their 30's and 40's.  They had a playlist from their childhood / our marriage.  They brought shirts for us to wear.  

The design is of two trees:  a white pine for Ned, referring to the Georgian Bay family cottage and an Elm tree for me, referring to the Elm tree on my parent's farm near Fort Frances.  Each tree is growing form its own root system, tall and strong, side by side.  

I've written about this 50 year thing before and I promise that this is the last post about it.  Shall we go on into the new year?  Best wishes to your family from mine for 2024.  xoxo