help me to balance

I made another sleeve this week.

Making sleeves so that my quilts can hang on the wall is not my favourite part of making quilts.

The problem is that most of my quilts have two good sides.

I never know myself which one is really the front and which is the back and both sides are the right side in my mind.

The brown nine patch side of this flannel quilt is named Dear Earth.

The Dear Earth side will be the back-side for a SAQA global exhibition coming up in France.

The show is called Minimalism and it was juried by Dorothy Caldwell.

Dorothy chose the other side of this quilt, 'help me to balance', to be in the exhibition.

I made a sleeve from a narrow domestic wool textile already hand stitched with red thread.  It has a few moth holes, but I think it is OK.

I lined it with a silk tube and attached everything by hand to Dear Earth.

It's not invisible, that's for sure, but I think that it is functional.

SAQA exhibitions require that a cloth label be attached to the back

I had enough cloth to embroider a label and attach it to the lower right of Dear Earth, see above photo.

'help me to balance' old domestic sheets and towels, machine pieced, hand quilted with red thread,      90 x 66 inches, 2018.

Dear Earth.  Help me to balance. xo

more softness

I feel awe every day
when I look out at the sun glittering on the water
and every night when the moon does the same thing.

I live in a lonely beauty.
Manitou means God.  Manitoulin Island is Spirit Island,

and this spiritual place is embedded in my stitched art.

This work also is based on the ideas of destruction and reparation

and more softness.
honesty.

More humility.

Life changes in an ordinary instant.
We bleed.

My work is done in a rush of slow.

It gives me self-healing.
I hope that it communicates something to the inner inner of my viewers.

This piece arrived for me without too much thinking,
in a rush,
It came out of an almost erotic inner dreamworld
very sensuous and intuitive,

and then my hands touched and touched it.

I stitched and stitched
through the spring
throughout the summer
and now it is September

and all the while i knew it was art and yet it was also something else.
A healing cloth.
I felt myself becoming whole.

inner symbols
cosmic
circle-heart
almost a mandala

My work holds the whirl of each day
the rush of time
the emotions of life

I'm just doing the best I can.

work in progress

soul is the essence
essence  from within
it is where everything begins

Van Morrison

I look for the poetic in my world of experience and under my own skin.
In my heart.
A recovery of the world through poetics.
A reclaiming of sensory experience, seeing tasting hearing touching
A reclamation of the body.

Adrienne Rich

Above are four vintage ironing pads lined up left to right as they were layerd on the board, bottom to top.

The dark one on the left is natural wool and probably about 90 years old
I think the singed one next to it is also a wool felt.
The third one, also felt, but it might have acrylic mixed with the wool.  It is nearly new.
The last one is a scorch resistent metallic fabric that covers them all.

I've had these since 2006, the year Ned's mother passed.
I could not throw them away
They held something.  They looked like figures.

Maternal stories are forgotten and lost and our culture encourages this amnesia.

What is the poetic meaning held by these old cloths?

time
and heat
and labour and protection
and presenting ourselves neatly to society
and women standing up and bearing down
and daily repetition
and the smell of damp hot wool
and singe marks
and body-size and shape

why would I add red thread?
red thread is often added to domestic cloth as a marker, usually intials
red thread is also a protection element found in traditional world garments

The work of art is like an act of mourning.
Mourning is a way to work through feelings of loss.
All creation is a re-creation of a loved and lost object.

Melanie Klein

the body and the spirit
the self in the center
the layers of time and of labour

Cloth is like the body.
It gets old, it survives, it holds memories and dreams - all at the same time.

 sculpture

 not just pretty little stitching marks

reparation

Soul is what you've been through
What's true for you
Where you going to
What you're gonna do

Van Morrison

finished pieces can be seen here