Box One

I live on a sweet island.  

It is quiet here, just birdsong and wind in the trees.

The kinds of moments in nature that happen quickly and then are gone.

We remember them in our bodies.

I watch the lake every day.

The colours of the sky and the water change all the time. 

There are things in nature that we are unconsciously aware of.

The interconnectedness between the land, the air, and humanity is one of these.

I use all the senses in my work.

Smell, sound, touch, taste, sight and also the sixth sense - mystery.

Art is like nature.  It opens the inner world.

My work reflects the quietness of nature.

I work alone for long hours laying in repetitive marks inspired by nature's way.

I make large scale, hand stitched drawings and sculptures based on simple repetition.

I use domestic textiles and natural dye.  

I have been exhibiting my work for 40 years. 

The aesthetics of simplicity, time, labour and repetition ground my work.  

My completed works reflect who I am.  My work is me.

This is why I use dyes from my locale.  

This is why I use family textiles.

This is why I use large space. 

My language is the stitched mark.

I keep paring away anything else.

I've created a body of work using wool blankets, plant dyes, and hand stitch. 

Some pieces were inspired by the monumental rock cuts of Northern Ontario highways. 

I'm packing my work this week.  

The exhibition with Penny Berens at the Mississippi Valley Textile Museum in Almonte Ontario is finally happening.  

I have five boxes of completed work to ship.  

I'll show what is going into Box Two in a couple of days.     

I am so glad to be finally getting this work out.

You must be getting bored with it. 

New Work

Island Heart 2020 by Judy Martin,
rayon, silk, rust, harvested local plant-dyes, a few commercial fabrics including my late father's hospital gown
 80" h x 73" w, embroidered with wool yarns and hand quilted with cotton threads 

I took photographs of finished new work last week.
Looking at my work through photographing it gives give me a distance from it.
I'm able to see my own work more clearly.

I am a woman and am often interupted.
This means that my work develops deeply, with many layers, over a period of months.
Because I usually have many pieces underway,
I just put them away in drawers or shelves for breaks of three to four months
and they steep.

As time whirls past,
my life experiences alter how I see those pieces in the drawers,
so that when I bring them out to work on again,
I see them more clearly and am ready to move forward.
However, very often, my work and I move need to move backwards.
Things need to be un-picked so that my work and I can start up again on a different path.

Flowers Started Blooming Inside Me  2020, Judy Martin 
rescued wool blanket saddened with iron, holes cut into it, autobiographical artwork and velvet appliqued onto it,
 hand stitched with wool threads   67"h x 26" w (when folded in....62" wide when full width)

It was through photographing it that I was inspired to make a cocoon shape out of the blanket piece.

Flowers Started Blooming Inside Me went through so many stages, all very intense and quite personal. 

I cut the holes to make it vulnerable because women are full of holes and are so open.
I added the spirals and the horizontal stitching after so it would be stronger.

Those red spirals.
They seem like flowers.
And as I worked on the piece, I began to feel loved.
Was it the work that did this?

" I wish my work to have the lightness and joyousness of a springtime which never lets anyone suspect the labours it has cost"   Henri Matisse

Touching The Stars 2020, Judy Martin 
silk velvet, harvested local plant dyes, appliqued to commercially embroidered linen base, then folded.  51" h x 21" w   

I finished the velvet piece late at night, pinned it to the wall rather carelessly and went to bed.
I woke early with this piece on my mind and when I saw it again I realized that it was a self portrait.
It's me.
It's how I feel about my body when I do not have a mirror.
I feel soft.

Touching the Stars
Like my other new work, the materials led me.
This one is velvet, with unexpected rich surprises of colour from local plants.
Velvet responds so well to dye process.
It's so lush and soft.
I kept stitching it and touching it.
It was the touching of it that made me want to tuck it in towards itself.
This made it even more loveable.

My work makes use of the things that only thread and cloth can do.

Prayer to the Sky  2019  Judy Martin
three layers of wool, (madder interior layer, indigo exterior layer), tucked, embroidered and hand quilted,
cut to reveal the inner layer, 60" h x 64.5" w 

The indigo horizon piece was unpicked a lot.
The barely there marks are like chanting.

Perhaps it too is about female interior yearning and fragility and openness and sadness.

These new pieces are the sexiest I have ever made.

Cloth becomes charged with touch.

We rub and cut and pierce and poke and touch.  

Eventually it feels as if the cloth touches us back.

(an Abbas Akhavan idea)

This is my work.

the tenderest thing

 softness

 honesty

 humility

 bleeding

 our bodies are a way of knowing

 and cloth is like the body

 life experience

 wisdom

day dream

Jouissance

Joyful passion that extols female sexual pleasure and the maternal.

The tremendous strength of the female spirit.

This time last year, I was in England, and visited Levens Hall and saw these joyful trees.

circles, domes, eggs, spheres,
boxes, biomorphic shapes, body like materials,
fragmentary, non-linear
are abstractions that represent the female

Lucy Lippard said this in the 70's