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

Love Spreads

Another post about doing my work while grandmothering the new twins.

I only had one piece with me for nearly three weeks and it's gone through several nick names.

For a while I called it Holy Rothko, because of the dark reddish field of colour floating between the warm grey linen borders and because of the holes that marked it in a grid.

Then as I continued working on it, I called it Holy Holy, because it had taken on a spiritual quality.

For a while it was as if this piece helped me confront my own mortality.  

Grace with Juni

.

Judy with Daisy

I'm working it from the back side, stitching with running stitch around and around the backsides of the reverse applique dots, and then cutting away the sheer fabric that covers them.

So that the velvet circles bloom.   

While in the rented house, I'm taking care of Grace's cat for a while as her household gets used to the twins.    In the above photo, you can spy the quilt I mended last year on the bed.  Ned didn't come this time, but our other two daughters took turns helping their sister.

Mostly I've been cooking for the new parents.  I've been using recipes from the pandemic cookbook I compiled in 2020 of family favourites.  

I've been able to get in an hour of stitching by the window in our rented house each morning.

The piece is still not finished, but getting closer.

Love Spreads pinned to studio wall, nearly finished.

Newest title?  Love Spreads 

Inspired by a quote Maria Popova  sent me in her newsletter:  

Love is essentially self-communicative:  those that do not have it catch it from those who have it.  True love is unconquerable and irresistible; and it goes on gathering power and spreading itself, until eventually it transforms everyone whom it touches.  Meher Baba   

circles repeated and repeated

what endures?

old cloth

a spiritual place covered with marks

the directness of paint with the substance of thread

communication with the environment

large scale

immensity of space, minutiae of surface

the time we need to cope with life and death

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.

continuing on

 everything is so alive

there are many possibilities

 I added energy marks to my blanket piece over the weekend

 It was Canada Day and my sidekicks were with us at the cottage

April made daily sourdough

 I started again with the grey blanket

and the sky continued to hold the moon

Alicia Henry

I went back to the Powerplant last week to see Alicia Henry's powerful exhibition, Witnessing for the second time.

 "Henry creates two-dimensional singular figures and group compositions that are commanding in their grace and expressiveness. "

 "Tender renditions of mother and child appear, as do groupings of more females that signifiy formations of families within communities"

 "Through their direct gaze and erect composure, Henry's multigenerational survivors exude a powerful strength and confidence.  They stand in anticipation of an egalitarian future - a utopian goal that underpins much of Henry's work"

 I am visiting the Powerplant in Toronto more this year because our daughter April (in above photo to demonstrate the gigantic scale of these wall mounted figures) is working right next door at Harbourfront craft and design studios as a resident artist this year.

I want to share the powerful simplicity and the confident handling of materials by Alicia Henry.  I was really moved and inspired by this exhibition. 

All text in quotes is from the pamphlet provided by The Power Plant.