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 travels through her life story and also mirrors 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.

making quilts

 Crown of Thorns 1972.  first quilt by Judy Martin
 re-purposed clothing and curtain fabric, hand pieced and hand quilted, 
(no longer exists)

I made my first quilt when I was twenty, and my second one when I was 24.  I've never gone to therapy like my children do.  I've made quilts instead.

self portrait, 1985
hand painted cotton, re-purposed maternity clothing, hand quilted 42 x 42 inches 

When I started having babies,  quilt making fit into my day better than any other art form.

Judy (31 years) with her two older children in 1982 

I live in Northern Ontario.  I've lived here all my life.  

The quilts I made during my 30’s and 40’s are shocking in their lack of skill.  I gave the baby quilts (learning samples) away to new parents who accepted them graciously.  

spider web baby quilt, 1983
polyester-cotton blends, machine pieced, hand quilted
this photo from 1999 when the baby was 16.  She was using it as a car blanket.

What's going on with them?  I look at the photos in this post and I could say so much about each one, but it would only be interesting for me.

They are soft objects that came together from materials I could touch, were real.

They also came from some kind of fantasy of what I hoped and dreamed and could not name.   

Skipping, 1988   fabric paint, cotton fabrics, machine pieced, hand quilted 

Quilts are slow to make.

There are a lot of repetitive tasks involved that put a person into a meditative state. 

And as I was making them, not only did I feel comforted, I also felt that here was the place I could say things that were not "normal".

About the photos in this blog post.  I spent all day yesterday writing and deleting text, but the images here have been stable.  I wanted to write about how I learned to quilt with no mentor.  

I studied fine art and received a fine art degree from Lakehead University while the kids were still little, but quilts were not part of the curriculum.    Quilts are not part of the fine art world.

Today, Yesterday, Tomorrow, 1995
hand painted clotton, overdyed cotton, machine pieced, hand quilted,
grocery list embroidered on reverse side

And the quilting world was very rigid at the time.  There were quilt police with rules and points and 12 stitches per inch.   My quilts were accepted into juried shows but they rarely won awards.  They were not understood in the quilt world. 

The quilts I made when I was actively mothering were related to my daily life as a mother and also to the fantasy I had about what quilts could be.  Even when they were finished, I maintained that fantasy and loved my own work.  I believe that making them saved my life.

We moved from Kenora to Manitoulin when the kids were 6, 8, 13, and 15 years old.  They went to school and I taught classical piano in a church basement.  

protection blanket  2005.  Chemical dyes on rayon embellished with sequins and ribbon,
machine pieced, hand quilted

In 2005, we had an empty nest.   I began this blog in 2006. 

I kept making my quilts.  I didn't know what I was doing in so many words, but I kept doing it.  

When I gathered up the few here I looked at them more critically.  They don't speak for me the way they used to but they remain evidence that I was here.     

prayer cloth: hope  2024    natural dyes on cotton, hand pieced, hand quilted with red thread 

This is a much edited post.  Thank you for continuing to read it.  

Psychic:  derived from the unconscious rather than the conscious.

Therapy:  care and attention

Making quilts:  still saving my life.

statement and a gallery of my recent work

medicine earth 2021 wool, linen, hand stitch, 73.5 x 73 inches

I have been exhibiting my hand stitched textiles for over four decades. For the last dozen years or so, I have been making my work from rescued table linens, old wool blankets, and beautiful new fabrics such as velvet, silk, wool, and linen that I dye myself with locally harvested plants or kitchen waste. I create large scale abstract artworks with the aim to communicate in a poetic way. By poetic I mean that I want my viewer’s personal and large inner world to rise up while they slowly move alongside or around one of my pieces. 

Eternity 2021, Prayer to the Sky 2019, Thoughts and Memories and Dreams 2024

My work is sculptural. The quilts or blankets are double-sided, with each side having its own title. The cloaks, cocoons and bundles that I make hang from the ceiling or are presented on plinths. With my art, I hope to invite a reverie, such as one receives from being alone in nature. 

Time Future: Touch the Stars 2021,  Eternity 2021 

I believe that the sense of touch gives a direct path to the inner world and so I hand-stitch many repeated textural marks into the large areas of cloth to give my work haptic power. I want the urge to touch it or be touched by it, to be almost overwhelming. 

Underfoot the Earth Divine 2020, damask linen, natural dyes, hand stitch 89 x 89 inches, 
Her Arms Wrapped Round and My Heart, wool bundles, the size of toddlers

The soft materials I prefer contain stories about time. Memories can be triggered by these repurposed domestic cloths, either about family dinners, or about feeling warm and protected while falling into the vulnerability of sleep and dream. I use natural dyes, hand pieced small and large pieces of cloth, embroidered circles, feelings of vastness and cosmic mystery, phenomenological knowledge, and the power of unique, slow, textural marks, each one placed by the hand.

Soft Summer Gone 2017  silk, natural dyes, wool and silk threads, hand stitch 100 x 100 inches

I grew up on 160 acres outside of Fort Frances, North Western Ontario. As a child I experienced many long days of solitude and daydream.

My Open Heart 2017 wool, natural dyes, hand stitch 58 x 48 inches

In order to regain that open way of being I choose to live and work on an island in Lake Huron, and to spend most of my time alone. My husband and I have lived and worked on Manitoulin Island for over thirty years and feel privileged to be welcomed here on Ojibwe and Odawa land. We raised our children here. Manitou means The Great Spirit in the Anishinaabeg language and the palpable spiritual quality of this place feeds me, every day and every night of the year.

Under Drifting Stars  2022, cotton, natural dyes, hand embroidery quilted, 80 x 91 inches

I am a second-generation settler, as my father immigrated to Burris township in North Western Ontario from Finland when he was five years old. The Finnish aesthetic of simplicity and noble poverty greatly informs my work. 

Cloudy Day 2024, wool, velvet, cotton, hand stitch  91 x 52 inches

However, my work is also fed by daily views of Manitowaning Bay and the Wikwemikong Peninsula that I enjoy.

Sacred Ground 2024  wool, natural dye, hand stitch, 64 x 37.5 inches

I’ve never lived in an urban centre for longer than a month or two at a time but instead, have chosen to live close to nature and rather isolated on this sparsely-populated island. Both of my university degrees in fine art were obtained through distance education. I’m very grateful for the internet which connects me to art and culture around the world.

Earth and Air  2017  wool, linen, natural dyes, hand stitch  94 x 82 inches

The intent of my work is that it will make you feel like I do when I am alone looking out over the horizon or moving slowly through a windy field of grass or forest path.

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  

fifty

Most of the things in our lives that make us who we are - our hearts, minds, bodies, ideas, passions - have kept the same as they were in our twenties when we met (me 19, him 21) and then married (me 22, him 24).  (bodies not so much)

We celebrated 50 years of marriage on September 8.  I am so grateful for him.   

He has been a rock for me and a companion and a lover.  He has supported my art.  We didn't know when we started this adventure in 1973 that he would end up being a financial planner for social work and that I would end up being an artist, but that's what we have evolved into, along with being a lucky couple.

Ned and Judy.

September 8 2023

my eleven minute talk

This talk is from May 12, 2023.  Penny Berens and I have an exhibition up now in Kenora, North Western Ontario, entitled In the Middle of the World.  We travelled to Kenora to see our work and have public receptions for it on the recent Mother's Day weekend.  I lived in Kenora for ten years during my 30's and our children went to school there.  Because of this deep connection to the community, I felt that it would be interesting for the audience, many of whom would remember me from that time, to speak about how the family and I have evolved in the 30 years since we moved away from Kenora.  I am presenting all the text and most of the images here.  Maybe get yourself a coffee or something before starting to read as this is longer than my usual posts. xo

Sophie LaVoie, curator of the Muse, introduced the three of us and then Penny and I were introduced by our loyal and hard working curator, Miranda Bouchard.  I began my talk with thanks - to Miranda first, and then to Lori Nelson, the director of the Muse as well as Sophie and her team for the beautiful installation of our work and for the hospitality of the opening reception. I thanked the Ontario Arts Council for funding to ship my work to Kenora.  I also thanked the audience for coming out to hear us speak.

I'm from Northern Ontario.

I was born in Fort Frances hospital and grew up on an acreage in LaVallee.  I went to Thunder Bay for Teacher's College and met my husband there.  We moved to Kenora in 1982 with two little kids and two more were born in Kenora.  I was a full-time mom when we lived in Kenora, in our house with the yellow verandah on First Street South.  My kids all went to school here, and I went to school here too.  I took distance university from Lakehead on the weekends at Beaverbrae High School.  When I lived in Kenora, my daily attention and my art practice was all about mothering.

I painted my kids.

I also made quilts about my life experiences.  This self portrait is from after the 3rd baby.  1985. 

Penny Cummine and I founded the Lake of the Woods Quilt Guild in the 80's.  Our first meeting was in the Recreation Centre.  The quilt behind me in this photo is entitled Something More Magical Than It Ever Was.  It is about memory, and how it changes over time and about how people remember things differently than each other.

With textile art, I found that I was able to speak about things that were going on internally.  I was a thinker then and I still am.  My artwork is a place where I can work through metaphysical things and make them simple.  Like telling people out loud that I love them.  

Looking back I can see that even then, my subject was the inner world.  The quilt above from 1993 is entitled:  Hold Me   The text around the border reads, “when you consider something like death, then it probably doesn’t matter if we try too hard, are awkward sometimes, in order to know life”.  (Diane Ackerman A Natural History of the Senses)

In 1993, I graduated with a degree in fine art from Lakehead University.  My graduation piece was about daily life in my Kenora house.   I didn’t know when I started building this house from photographs of our back yard and women's magazine papers of idealized life that it was my final year to live in it.  I wanted to show you this piece because it is the first example of my art where I wanted my viewer to move through the work.  In this way, it is similar to my work for In the Middle of the World.  I made The House With the Golden Windows 30 years ago during the last year that I lived here in Kenora.  I was 41. 

We moved to Manitoulin Island.  We had to continue on with our lives.  My oldest was in high school.  My youngest was going into grade one.

I started teaching classical piano again and held two concerts a year in the church next to the school.  Our children grew up and left for university.

This is our youngest child April.  She went to art school in Chicago. That’s Ned beside her in this photo.   Ned and I have remained on Manitoulin.  It is still considered Northern Ontario.  I’ve lived in Northern Ontario all my life.

I have a view of Manitowaning Bay from my living room window that I look out every day.  

In 2006, I enrolled in a distance program in England that would give me a degree in embroidery.  It wasn't possible then to study stitched textiles in North America, but in England, embroidery has the same status as painting and drawing.  I graduated in 2012 at the age of 61.  The work I did for this second university degree helped me move towards making artwork about the inner world and the body and how they are connected.  And how it is all a mystery.

By now we were having grandchildren. The fourth one was born in 2017.

Last Tuesday, May 9,  I began the drive from Manitoulin Island to be here.   I picked up Penny and Miranda in Sault Ste. Marie.  We were excited to do this beautiful drive together.

During the next two days of driving, we saw the renewal of spring in the expanses of pale green poplar groves.  We saw armies of black spruce and lakes that looked like mirrors and burnt-out hill sides and acres of muskeg.

We talked about our art making and about what we would say for this talk.  We connected with each other. 

My work in the gallery upstairs contains the northern ness and the vastness that I grew up with.

It contains my life as a daughter and a mother.  Some of the pieces enclose inner mystery and softness.

The Nor Wester mountains around Thunder Bay, the granite cliffs alongside Highway 17 as well as my daily view on Manitoulin all inform my work.

The sense that time is moving swiftly informs my work.  Here I am.  30 years older, whirling along the road.   Thinking about things.

My mothering.  My northern-ness.  Time.

We are each specks.

Time is a material.

The sense of touch communicates on an emotional level.

Things that are bigger than us but are contained in us.

My Awakened Heart is one of the first pieces I made for this body of work.  It sets the tone of trust in intuition.  I am inspired by the materials and how they change under my hands.

I began working because of a piece of fabric. I was inspired by the dots on a piece of Naomi Ito double-weave cloth.  If I cut into the top layer, I was able to reveal the inside cloth.  I started working on it with a plunge, drawing a circle with scissors, without knowing what would come next.

Through the months of making it., not with intention but with response - it became a statement about self love and repair.

I began to love the beautiful second side.  Distorted with stitch.

And I responded to that second side by covering it over, but then revealing the circle of stitch by cutting a hole.  

The title comes from Pema Chodron, the Buddhist nun who lives in Nova Scotia.  My Awakened Heart for the first side and Noble Tenderness for the second side.  Pema Chodron tells us to allow our hearts to be opened by pain or by love or by sadness or fear or by all these things and to keep forgiving.  She wrote that the heart is noble, and never gets destroyed.  She said that when we feel ready to give up, that is the time when healing is found in the tenderness of pain itself.  The noble heart is always inside us, opened and yet completely whole. 

Materials and the work of my hands.

The sensuality of cloth.

Cycles of life.

Cycles of nature.

Flowers Bloomed is the last piece that I made for this show and is another example of intuitive process.  I responded to the materials and the changes that happened under my hands.  What happened in the end was not prescribed at the beginning, it evolved.

I started it after a medical appointment that made me realize I was aging.  I came home from that appointment and cut holes into an old blanket.  The initial emotion that started this piece was FEAR. 

But as I worked on it, it became more about love.  

I named it Flowers Started Blooming Inside Me.

I continued with it and under my hands it returned to the original subject of aging.  But instead of fear, there is an acceptance of being older, and I renamed the piece Flowers Bloomed.  

Working this way demonstrates how art comes from a deep place inside us.  We can’t see or name what it is.  It is brave to allow it and to accept it.  Even though the eventual work process is slow,  there is spontaneity involved.  ‘Plunge in and go slow’ is what I say to myself. 

I find that working through strong emotions like fear or anger with my slow art, heals me.  

Flowers Bloomed is an example of body/mind connection.  Of allowing the body and the emotions to take the lead, and then stepping away for a bit, to reflect.  Then, responding and changing the piece entirely.  It is an intuitive process.  None of the pieces in my body of work for this exhibition were figured out ahead of time.

However, I was making work for a two person show.  

There was a curator involved. 

We each owed it to the others to let them know what we were up to in our studios.  Every now and then Miranda would ask for lists of proposed works and we would send in what we were making.

My titles (and shapes) kept changing every time with nearly every piece.  

There were some pieces on my list that never were finished.  

It must have been difficult for Miranda, but she never said so.  Never.  

She was always very supportive to anything I did.  

  

Judy age 7

Art making is a radical acts of hope in this broken world.

Governor general award winning author Sheila Heti says: We have been chosen to live in this terrible time.

Judy age 14

She says: We have been chosen to live in this heart breaking time.”

It is the responsibility of the artist at this time in history to keep making authentic work.  Just by continuing, just by expressing the human passion within, just by creating something about being alive, shows hope for the future.

Her Arms Wrapped Round  and My Heart

 “When my arms wrap you round,  I press

 my heart upon the loveliness

 that has long faded form the world”  W.B. Yeats

three of our children in our Kenora kitchen

I'm interested in time.

the four of them grown up.  three girls and a boy

I’m on a journey towards self.

I am softer now than when I lived in Kenora and organized quilt shows and volunteered to play the piano in Kindergarten.  I wear pink more.  I try to be kinder.  It’s a journey to softness.

Grace had twins in December.  Our 6^th and 7^th grandchildren

Thank you for your attention. I now invite Penny  to take over. xo