your silence creates a world for my language

This is a post about an exhibition currently on view in Sault Ste Marie, Ontario at the artist run gallery, 180 projects.  A friend and I made the trip last week to view it.  It was my first art gallery experience in 18 months and well worth the 3+ hour drive.    

The artist is Sophie Anne Edwards, one of north eastern Ontario's most intelligent and passionate advocates for culture.  She is a poet, a painter, a curator, a geographer, and a long time arts administrator on Manitoulin Island.  I am enriched to know her. 

Sophie is easily brought to tears by the environmental crises and wanted to create a body of work that would address this monstrous, overwhelming fear in a personal way.  The artist's home is surrounded by ash trees, and she fears that they will all die because of a silent killer brought to Canada from Asia through international trade, the Emerald Ash Borer.  

The Emerald Ash Borer is an insect that drills through the outer bark to lay eggs in ash trees.  The larvae hatch and tunnel under the bark of the ash tree during the year or so while they mature, chewing lines that silently remove the inner wood.  

Another concern of this artist is something that happens more frequently than we know, yet is kept secret; domestic abuse to women and girls.  The victims are scarred for life, .  

Sophie became my CSARN mentee in 2018 and we talked and cried together over a period of  nearly 2 years.  Her ideas about materials and what she wanted to say with her artwork were strong.  Why did she come to me?  I think that she needed to slow down.  She needed to realize the comfort of hand stitch.  Although she already understood the power and intimacy of this kind of mark making, I helped her to focus on just a few of her ideas and taught her the back stitch.  

"I think about quiet violences -- to the environment, to women.  The silences that go unnoticed, or unspoken.  That happen quietly, under bark and behind closed doors.  That are carried in on crates, and through hushed words. "  Sophie A Edwards

Sophie Edwards wrapped one of the ash trees near her residence
with a bed sheet marked with red thread and hawthorns and left it for two years.  
A video of her suturing this ineffectual protection is part of the exhibition. 

"Those that go unregulated, and those that regulate us  The silences that change a landscape, and a life.  This project explores and links environmental and sexual violences."  Sophie A Edwards

"There is a silent language we can read in the Emerald Ash Borer tracks, and there is a silence we keep about sexual violences, which leaves its own tracks and traces.  This silence leaves space for the language of invasive and invaders."  Sophie A Edwards

There is a beautiful catalogue available from the artist or from 180 projects that has gorgeous photos of the exhibition and more of Sophie's own words.  

in my traces you will find silence,

or bring your own to it.

In my tracks you will find the language 

of my having been.

In my marks there is the 

record of my passage.  

Unable to read my lines,

you cannot hear.  Your

silence creates a world

for my language.

Sophie Anne Edwards

The exhibition continues until July 17.  180 projects

till it shines in the sun like gold leaf

So we have these fabulous gunnera plants in our garden

and sometimes I make bundles - the two above are from 2007

this post is about these things

and about PK Page's poem,  Planet Earth

It has to be loved like a laundress loves her linens

the way she moves her hands caressing the fine muslins

like a  lover coaxing or a mother praising

It has to be loved as if it were embroidered with flowers

and birds and two joined hearts upon it

it has to be stretched and stroked

it has to be celebrated

O this great beloved world and all the creatures in it

It has to be spread out, the skin of this planet

the trees must be washed, and the grasses and mosses

they have to be polished as if made of green brass

the sheets of lake water smoothed with the hand

 smoothing the holy surfaces

The Water Quilt by Joyce Wieland 1970-1971

 fabric, thread, grommets, rope and book pages

Joyce Wieland worked with her sister, Joan Stewert, and some others to make this powerful piece when she was 40 years old.  The delicacy of the hand embroidered cloth draws poignant attention to the vulnerability of Canada's arctic environment and protests the idea that the government might sell Canadian water.

 Each square is hand embroidered with an arctic flower.

 Under the hand stitched fabric, startling excerpts from James Laxer's The Energy Poker Game (1970) outline a scheme by an American corporation to seize control of northern waterways in Canada.

"I felt a sense of responsibility. .. It infuriated me to think that someone outside could be drawing up plans for stuff like that"  Joyce Wieland

above:  Wieland 2006 made by Brian Jungen (born 1970) from red leather gloves.
The title refers to Joyce Wieland, who was passionate about Canada, and was activelly engaged with Pierre Trudeau's nation-building project in the 1980's.  Brian Jungen is a first nations artist and the gallery wall text states "while feminism and sexual rights formed an important part of the discussion in the 70's and 80's, indigenous rights were not addressed" and that is why this maple leaf is upside down.

I have long admired The Water Quilt and was thrilled to see it during my visit to the Art Gallery of Ontario last weekend.  Joyce Wieland did love Canada and is one of our art heroines.  I've written about her before on this blog, collected here and on modernist aesthetic blog here.  

fire

I re-discovered something wonderful over the weekend. Everyone knows it, but we forget.
It is that we are small. We are little. Part of a huge continuum of connections between generations and with nature. The cottage is nearly a hundred years old, in Ned's family for generations. I remember so many things that happened there, he remembers more, but the place remembers the most. Looking up. Looking down. The spiritual feeling on that island warmed me even more than the fires did. I am not succeding at communicating the enormous sense of peace and happiness that filled me the whole weekend, but it seems urgent that I try. Solitude and quietness and closeness to nature, those things nurture us all, I am convinced. Maybe this is why I make quilts. They will outlast me.

these words from my studio wall

I've been doing a huge amount of reading, working on my dissertation proposal. To help figure things out, I've put words and phrases up on the wall but everything is still a haze.

ancient memory
the invisible
time is a material
nostalgia
every day life provides authenticity

Aristotle didn't talk about fear of mice. He went straight to the greatest universal fear, the fear of imminent death, like a passenger in a sinking ship.

uncanny
what lies beyond nature?
traditional technique embraced and transcended
nature's open space, yearning for light
silence

Planet Earth

Loved as if Embroidered with Flowers, fabric and paper collage (2002)

It has to be loved the way a laundress loves her linens,
the way she moves her hands caressing the fine muslins
knowing their warp and woof,
like a lover coaxing, or a mother praising.
It has to be loved as if it were embroidered
with flowers and birds and two joined hearts upon it.
It has to be stretched and stroked.
It has to be celebrated.
O this great beloved world and all the creatures in it.
It has to be spread out, the skin of this planet.

The trees must be washed, and the grasses and mosses.
They have to be polished as if made of green brass.
The rivers and little streams with their hidden cresses
and pale-coloured pebbles
and their fool's gold
must be washed and starched or shined into brightness,
the sheets of lake water
smoothed with the hand
and the foam of the oceans pressed into neatness.
It has to be ironed, the sea in its whiteness.

and pleated and goffered, the flower-blue sea
the protean, wine-dark, grey, green, sea
with its metres of satin and bolts of brocade.
And sky - such an 0! overhead - night and day
must be burnished and rubbed
by hands that are loving
so the blue blazons forth
and the stars keep on shining
within and above
and the hands keep on moving.

It has to be made bright, the skin of this planet
till it shines in the sun like gold leaf.
Archangels then will attend to its metals
and polish the rods of its rain.
Seraphim will stop singing hosannas
to shower it with blessings and blisses and praises
and, newly in love,
we must draw it and paint it
our pencils and brushes and loving caresses
smoothing the holy surfaces.© 1994 P.K. Page

I read this poem today as part of a presentation in church that included the United Church moderator's letter about the lack of action on Climate Change at Copenhagen. By Canadian poet P.K. Page, it is part of a United Nations program to foster dialogue among nations.

Inspiration surrounds me

I'll be away from my blog for a week as we're going to the cottage. Most of our children will be there, and I'll have my laptop and sewing machine but no internet. I realized yesterday how much my daily environment impacts upon my work. The broad horizon of lake huron, the travel to Europe that I hope to be able to continue, and the circular things that I collect for my home.

Have a wonderful creative week, and enjoy the last few days of summer. I'll be back in early September.

trees in France and Belgium

I'm still processing all the images and feelings taken in last month when we were in Europe. The trees there have different patterns than I'm used to, some forced on them by humans, others by nature.