wrecked

People are not aware of their abstract emotions,
which are a big part of their lives,
except when they listen to music
or look at art.

Agnes Martin

A woman made utility quilts as fast as she could 

so that her familly wouldn't freeze, and

she made them as beautiful as she could 

so that her heart wouldn't break.

American folk saying

image from April 2012
both quotes from my current journal
glad to be walking on my road again, the ice has gone. 

the river beneath

I'm always taken care of by my work.
You let go of your own idea and let the work go where it needs to go.
And that's sometimes very uncomfortable.
One learns to linger in discontent and not be judgmental, but to have faith.
Kiki Smith

more views of this piece in   New Work,  the river beneath.

spirit island

Manitoulin Island is called spirit island.

Manitoulin has a long history of settlement by a spiritual people.

Traces of these people go back at least 10,000 years in the area where I live.

I am allowing the spirit of place to come into my work.

I live on Manitoulin Island and I am white.

The culture that is true to the place where I live is not mine and I keep that in mind.  

The spirit in this land is generous and alive.

I use a hoop to help me hold the cloths I stitch.
When I work at a large scale, I feel as if the hoop helps me to hold the land.
Place and the spirit in the land are held in my lap.

Like each of us, I walk my own path of life story.

I have always lived in northern Ontario and my work reflects the isolation, solitude, big sky and water views that I grew up with and continue to live with. 

 My relationship with this land is that of an immigrant and of a settler.  A Canadian pioneer.

I look to history books, novels and poetry about the time periods in Canada when the settlers came.

I am inspired to work with vintage domestic embroideries and linens and wool blankets because so many of them came over from the old country.

I try to help them and me have a dialog with the land here in northern Canada.

I think about what daily life was like for the women pioneers and look at material objects that might hold history of it.

It takes me a long time to figure out how to honour these old textiles and make them relevant within contemporary thought and aesthetics.

I used the house shape in earlier work and now I use the bundle as metaphors for self and for the women pioneers who came to Canada and specifically, came to Manitoulin.  

I use saved domestic cloths.

I use the idea that all of us look out our windows no matter what our culture.

 All of us look at the full moon and the stars.

All of us stare endlessly at the horizon.


The text and pictures are from the talk I presented last Thursday in London Ontario.
More here.

time is a material

 re-constructed ninety year old wool blanket

Petty Harbour Newfoundland

 that this cloth holds time and memory is evident

 in the several threadbare areas

Cape Broyle, Newfioundland

 these worn places evoke the man,

 woman, or child who lay with the blanket

Ferryland, Newfoundland

 and repeatedly pulled it up as a covering

 I have darned some of the more worn areas

Renews, Newfoundland

 strengthened the edges with blanket stitch

to add another layer of human touch.

details of a wool blanket piece from last year
photos of our drive today, avalon penninsula, newfoundland

pattern

pattern attracts me
grid of branches,
palm-thatch lined up edge to edge

repetition
pattern

it occurs all the time,
all the time.
growth in spring and summer
death in fall and winter
repeat

we live a pattern,
we live repetition.
perhaps you will say that I am attracted to patterns and repetition because I am a quilt maker

But maybe I'm a quilt maker because there is pattern in our world

 images:  the thatched outside kitchen in the Cayman Heritage Garden in Queen Elizabeth II Botanical Park

The House With the Golden Windows

It has been a long time since I have written about this piece.

When I made it, we were living in Kenora, a middle sized town in North Western Ontario, two hours drive from Winnipeg, six hours from Thunder Bay. 

I was 40 years old and had four children ages 4 – 13 years.  My husband had just left Kenora for a new job on Manitoulin Island, and the children and I would soon follow him there.  It was the final year of my fine art degree from Lakehead University and I made this piece for my degree exhibition.  One of my advisors was Mark Nisenholt, who I will always remember as the one who loaned me his copy of Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space.  I have my own copy of that book now, and re-read it regularly. 

Sewing and quilting were not looked on with favour by the university, but for some reason, that did not deter me.  Rather, I was stubborn about it and built this house with thread.  I poured attention and time into it.  Ned was gone and I needed to finish the drywall and painting that had been left undone in our home so that we could sell it.  I sewed the magazine papers to the canvas in the middle of the night while the children slept. 

That was the year that I shared a studio with Barbara Sprague, an artist who was in the same stage of her fine art degree with Lakehead.  The studio was important to me.  I needed to pin the papers up on a wall and step back from them to look, I needed to be able to leave them in piles, untouched.  I left home for the studio as soon as my four year old stepped on the bus for junior kindergarten in the mornings, and was home again before she was dropped off around 11:30 am. 

 (This isn’t really an artist statement; it’s more of a memoir.  )

The way that windows are able to look like gold at a certain slant of light was the impetus for this installation.  When I was a child, we lived in the country, and I remember being in the back seat of the car driving home and my mother telling me to look at the golden windows of the houses that we passed.  And I did.  I looked at them.  They had a magical quality.

So magical, that when I was a mother of four and had a house of my own I remembered that idea of looking at domesticity from the outside.  Of imagining what it might be like.  What it could be like.  That is what the outside walls of this piece are about; the dreams and hopes a young woman has for her home and family.  So many of those dreams are fed to us by our society’s consumerism and by the fairy tales we are brought up with, but some of them come true. 

It’s very complex.  I built the walls of my house from small squares of paper carefully cut from glossy magazines that promise a beautiful life.

the house with the golden windows: north wall

the outside, 1993, 5 feet x 5 feet x 1/2 inch the phases of the moon, hand stitch glossy magazine papers collected, sorted, machine stitched Reverse side. The inside of the north wall film photographs taken through the north windows of our house in Kenora, North Western Ontario. nearly twenty years ago I took one photo a day for one year (1990) from one of the windows of our house. When I documented our life in this way, I had no idea that we would soon be moving south, to Manitoulin Island.

built environment Nova Scotia

painted cedar shingles a lunenberg bump (the bay window above the front door) multi gables The buildings in Nova Scotia look settled and loved. Older than what I am used to in Northern Ontario. Once home, I went straight into piano teaching and am only now am I able to reflect on my time there and how it has affected me and perhaps my work.