all the lived emotions

A couple of years ago I wrapped up some textiles that I had saved for a long time as a way to tidy things up.  I called them Mothering Bundles and took 42 of them to local curator Nicole Weppler in 2023.  She hung about 20 of them up in the Gore Bay museum.  See here.  

I like the unusual combination of nostalgia and minimalism that the mothering bundles embody. Wrapped in wool blanket cloth and numbered because without a list, it was impossible to tell what was inside each one.   

They had become little still points.  Separate sacred mysteries.

I re-wrapped 25 of them this past May with fabrics from failed online clothing purchases and unfinished quilt tops.  They became more individual, more interesting. 

They are each different from one another, yet retain the minimalist aesthetic I prefer. 

However, it's still impossible to remember what is inside them without a chart. 

 

This teaches me that our inner world is secret and can never be known just by looking at the surface. 

A few of these newly wrapped bundles make up a two-part sculpture.  "All the Lived Emotions".

(To give you an idea of what I've wrapped, the bundle at the top of this post contains the t-shirts that I wore in the 70's when we biked through Europe.  The next one contains the mermaid costume I made our 7 year old.  The last one holds fabrics from close friends who have since died.)  

Murmuration

murmuration 

This is a post about a new quilt top, murmuration.  I want to write about the process and how it made me feel as I machine pieced pinwheels from silk samples that were given to me by my daughter April and her friend, Em J, who works in film costuming. 

I want to write about how I let this obsession happen and how I loved that it happened.  I was in a rare place of creativity and had to keep sewing and pinning to the wall until finished.  

I used silly rules things like having to sew the four half square triangle blocks of a pinwheel together when I ran out of pins and then eventually having to sew two pinwheels together when I ran out of pins again.

And I want to tell you how I used my body, not my mind, (unless it was my mind that made up the limits and rules). For example I didn't let myself change the size of the gifted strips of cloth.  If they were 5 1/2 inches wide, I left them that size and therefore had to pair them with another strip the same size.  Eventually, when I was forced by to change colour, I would trim the larger piece, and that is why there are smaller triangles.  They are the trimmings from the wider strips.                    

I also added some pieces from my own supply of shot silks, but chose not to have any reds or yellows in order keep to the rather sombre palette in the original fabrics.  

Usually when I work I turn the phone timer to one hour but for the ten days that it took me to do this piecework, I turned it to two hours at a time.  Even then, time went by so quickly.

And yet, physically, I tried to slow everything down.  I used my body and moved a fair amount for each step.  I cut the four squares needed for a pinwheel at my cutting board and then marked them carefully with the diagonal lines for seams and then I would walk around the table to my sewing machine and sew them together and cut them.  Then I had to get up and go to the iron in order to press them flat, and then walk into another room to the pinwall and place them.  Then I sat for a while in my chair and look at it all, eventually getting up to go back to the cutting board to cut out two more sets of squares.  My rules said that they had to be a different pair than the previous time which made it interesting for me.  My point is that I did not try to cut a whole bunch of squares at one time, or do any chain piecing, or iron everything at the same time.  Each block was done one at a time and then looked at.  Regarded. It was like painting with my body and the sewing machine and the iron and those beautiful silks.

I wanted to tell you this thing about moving my body more than I needed to because of the feeling that it was necessary to slow down the machine sewing.  I used the wall as if it was a piece of paper or canvas and worked by intuition in that arbitrary placement.  I was obsessed with getting the whole thing finished though, because of the placement.  It wasn’t as if I could just pile up the blocks and put them in a drawer, I had to finish it in the one go.  At least that's how it felt.  Urgent.

When I finished I put my coat and boots on and took my cane so that I could manage my way down the gentle slope that was deep in drifted snow and pinned the sewn assemblage on the line I have there, down in the cedars.  

It had snowed three or four inches overnight and the east morning light was delightful on the moving lake.  

Now I've chosen a backing cloth from the silk fabric that my instagram friend, Fabia, gifted me earlier this year (two shades of gold), and I will hand stitch this not-square shape.

I love that it is shaped like a cloud and I may make another.  

The thing is, I thought I'd lost this almost erotic passion of losing myself in creativity for such a long period.  I realized that I was in that rare place where reality was outside of me. I was in a dream world and I knew it.  I was in another place.  I was aware of this and I loved it.

It's hard to write this so it makes sense, but maybe you understand.  

I think you do.  

a pilgrimage

pilgrimage:  noun

a journey made to some sacred place as an act of devotion

a visit made to a place that is considered special, where you go to show your respect

I visited the Royal Ontario Museum when I was in Toronto last month.  The main reason to visit was in order to see this quilt, then on display in the special exhibition of  Quilts: Made in Canada.  

I met my brother and Kirsten there.

Pieced Triangles Quilt 1880
  Maker no longer known. 
 Asphodel-Norwood Township, Ontario. 
 Roller-printed cotton, plain weave

Look closely at this quilt: it's made of over 8000 light and dark triangles, each less than 2 centimetres long and hand-stitched together to create an intricate pattern from the smallest scraps.

The patient maker who sewed it worked outwards from the centre, creating a series of rectangular frames that slowly increase to build a quilt.  (wall text)  

I look at the movement of the colours

I sense the amount of time that each triangle took to place.

I appreciate the passage of time that this quilt has remained even though the maker has passed on.

I marvel at the accuracy of the intricate handwork.

I understand this woman.  

My imagination is engaged.

My interior world is entered into.

Her repeated touching reaches me at an intimate, personal level.

The sense of touch is powerful. 

"The impact of art touches something buried deep in embodied memory.  It is a mystery."  

Juhani Pallasmaa 

dream, earth, luck, moon, soul

dream

Beginning again.  

Beginning in the middle.

Here is my sewing.

earth

Art is about relationships.

earth (other side)

Art may seem as if it is about nature or beauty, but it is about love.

luck

The more I study art, the more I realize this.    

luck (other side)

Because love is caring.  

moon

Some call it wonder.

patience

 Some use the term 'unselfing'.     (here is a link)

patience (other side) 

In order to do my own unselfing I take risks with materials.

And then I make things from what has become wrecked.     

rose

It helps me make sense of being alive.  

rose (other side) 

I have so many things to say right now, that I am not able to say anything.  

That's why I am beginning in the middle.  Here is some sewing.

Here are some of the small wool and velvet bundles I made during July.     

soul

I've been to Great Britain. Lots to say about that.  some of it here.

I'm going to Nova Scotia.  The reason is an exhibition, mentioned here.

Women sew as a substitute for words. 

my eleven minute talk

This talk is from May 12, 2023.  Penny Berens and I have an exhibition up now in Kenora, North Western Ontario, entitled In the Middle of the World.  We travelled to Kenora to see our work and have public receptions for it on the recent Mother's Day weekend.  I lived in Kenora for ten years during my 30's and our children went to school there.  Because of this deep connection to the community, I felt that it would be interesting for the audience, many of whom would remember me from that time, to speak about how the family and I have evolved in the 30 years since we moved away from Kenora.  I am presenting all the text and most of the images here.  Maybe get yourself a coffee or something before starting to read as this is longer than my usual posts. xo

Sophie LaVoie, curator of the Muse, introduced the three of us and then Penny and I were introduced by our loyal and hard working curator, Miranda Bouchard.  I began my talk with thanks - to Miranda first, and then to Lori Nelson, the director of the Muse as well as Sophie and her team for the beautiful installation of our work and for the hospitality of the opening reception. I thanked the Ontario Arts Council for funding to ship my work to Kenora.  I also thanked the audience for coming out to hear us speak.

I'm from Northern Ontario.

I was born in Fort Frances hospital and grew up on an acreage in LaVallee.  I went to Thunder Bay for Teacher's College and met my husband there.  We moved to Kenora in 1982 with two little kids and two more were born in Kenora.  I was a full-time mom when we lived in Kenora, in our house with the yellow verandah on First Street South.  My kids all went to school here, and I went to school here too.  I took distance university from Lakehead on the weekends at Beaverbrae High School.  When I lived in Kenora, my daily attention and my art practice was all about mothering.

I painted my kids.

I also made quilts about my life experiences.  This self portrait is from after the 3rd baby.  1985. 

Penny Cummine and I founded the Lake of the Woods Quilt Guild in the 80's.  Our first meeting was in the Recreation Centre.  The quilt behind me in this photo is entitled Something More Magical Than It Ever Was.  It is about memory, and how it changes over time and about how people remember things differently than each other.

With textile art, I found that I was able to speak about things that were going on internally.  I was a thinker then and I still am.  My artwork is a place where I can work through metaphysical things and make them simple.  Like telling people out loud that I love them.  

Looking back I can see that even then, my subject was the inner world.  The quilt above from 1993 is entitled:  Hold Me   The text around the border reads, “when you consider something like death, then it probably doesn’t matter if we try too hard, are awkward sometimes, in order to know life”.  (Diane Ackerman A Natural History of the Senses)

In 1993, I graduated with a degree in fine art from Lakehead University.  My graduation piece was about daily life in my Kenora house.   I didn’t know when I started building this house from photographs of our back yard and women's magazine papers of idealized life that it was my final year to live in it.  I wanted to show you this piece because it is the first example of my art where I wanted my viewer to move through the work.  In this way, it is similar to my work for In the Middle of the World.  I made The House With the Golden Windows 30 years ago during the last year that I lived here in Kenora.  I was 41. 

We moved to Manitoulin Island.  We had to continue on with our lives.  My oldest was in high school.  My youngest was going into grade one.

I started teaching classical piano again and held two concerts a year in the church next to the school.  Our children grew up and left for university.

This is our youngest child April.  She went to art school in Chicago. That’s Ned beside her in this photo.   Ned and I have remained on Manitoulin.  It is still considered Northern Ontario.  I’ve lived in Northern Ontario all my life.

I have a view of Manitowaning Bay from my living room window that I look out every day.  

In 2006, I enrolled in a distance program in England that would give me a degree in embroidery.  It wasn't possible then to study stitched textiles in North America, but in England, embroidery has the same status as painting and drawing.  I graduated in 2012 at the age of 61.  The work I did for this second university degree helped me move towards making artwork about the inner world and the body and how they are connected.  And how it is all a mystery.

By now we were having grandchildren. The fourth one was born in 2017.

Last Tuesday, May 9,  I began the drive from Manitoulin Island to be here.   I picked up Penny and Miranda in Sault Ste. Marie.  We were excited to do this beautiful drive together.

During the next two days of driving, we saw the renewal of spring in the expanses of pale green poplar groves.  We saw armies of black spruce and lakes that looked like mirrors and burnt-out hill sides and acres of muskeg.

We talked about our art making and about what we would say for this talk.  We connected with each other. 

My work in the gallery upstairs contains the northern ness and the vastness that I grew up with.

It contains my life as a daughter and a mother.  Some of the pieces enclose inner mystery and softness.

The Nor Wester mountains around Thunder Bay, the granite cliffs alongside Highway 17 as well as my daily view on Manitoulin all inform my work.

The sense that time is moving swiftly informs my work.  Here I am.  30 years older, whirling along the road.   Thinking about things.

My mothering.  My northern-ness.  Time.

We are each specks.

Time is a material.

The sense of touch communicates on an emotional level.

Things that are bigger than us but are contained in us.

My Awakened Heart is one of the first pieces I made for this body of work.  It sets the tone of trust in intuition.  I am inspired by the materials and how they change under my hands.

I began working because of a piece of fabric. I was inspired by the dots on a piece of Naomi Ito double-weave cloth.  If I cut into the top layer, I was able to reveal the inside cloth.  I started working on it with a plunge, drawing a circle with scissors, without knowing what would come next.

Through the months of making it., not with intention but with response - it became a statement about self love and repair.

I began to love the beautiful second side.  Distorted with stitch.

And I responded to that second side by covering it over, but then revealing the circle of stitch by cutting a hole.  

The title comes from Pema Chodron, the Buddhist nun who lives in Nova Scotia.  My Awakened Heart for the first side and Noble Tenderness for the second side.  Pema Chodron tells us to allow our hearts to be opened by pain or by love or by sadness or fear or by all these things and to keep forgiving.  She wrote that the heart is noble, and never gets destroyed.  She said that when we feel ready to give up, that is the time when healing is found in the tenderness of pain itself.  The noble heart is always inside us, opened and yet completely whole. 

Materials and the work of my hands.

The sensuality of cloth.

Cycles of life.

Cycles of nature.

Flowers Bloomed is the last piece that I made for this show and is another example of intuitive process.  I responded to the materials and the changes that happened under my hands.  What happened in the end was not prescribed at the beginning, it evolved.

I started it after a medical appointment that made me realize I was aging.  I came home from that appointment and cut holes into an old blanket.  The initial emotion that started this piece was FEAR. 

But as I worked on it, it became more about love.  

I named it Flowers Started Blooming Inside Me.

I continued with it and under my hands it returned to the original subject of aging.  But instead of fear, there is an acceptance of being older, and I renamed the piece Flowers Bloomed.  

Working this way demonstrates how art comes from a deep place inside us.  We can’t see or name what it is.  It is brave to allow it and to accept it.  Even though the eventual work process is slow,  there is spontaneity involved.  ‘Plunge in and go slow’ is what I say to myself. 

I find that working through strong emotions like fear or anger with my slow art, heals me.  

Flowers Bloomed is an example of body/mind connection.  Of allowing the body and the emotions to take the lead, and then stepping away for a bit, to reflect.  Then, responding and changing the piece entirely.  It is an intuitive process.  None of the pieces in my body of work for this exhibition were figured out ahead of time.

However, I was making work for a two person show.  

There was a curator involved. 

We each owed it to the others to let them know what we were up to in our studios.  Every now and then Miranda would ask for lists of proposed works and we would send in what we were making.

My titles (and shapes) kept changing every time with nearly every piece.  

There were some pieces on my list that never were finished.  

It must have been difficult for Miranda, but she never said so.  Never.  

She was always very supportive to anything I did.  

  

Judy age 7

Art making is a radical acts of hope in this broken world.

Governor general award winning author Sheila Heti says: We have been chosen to live in this terrible time.

Judy age 14

She says: We have been chosen to live in this heart breaking time.”

It is the responsibility of the artist at this time in history to keep making authentic work.  Just by continuing, just by expressing the human passion within, just by creating something about being alive, shows hope for the future.

Her Arms Wrapped Round  and My Heart

 “When my arms wrap you round,  I press

 my heart upon the loveliness

 that has long faded form the world”  W.B. Yeats

three of our children in our Kenora kitchen

I'm interested in time.

the four of them grown up.  three girls and a boy

I’m on a journey towards self.

I am softer now than when I lived in Kenora and organized quilt shows and volunteered to play the piano in Kindergarten.  I wear pink more.  I try to be kinder.  It’s a journey to softness.

Grace had twins in December.  Our 6^th and 7^th grandchildren

Thank you for your attention. I now invite Penny  to take over. xo