our mother-daughter exhibition

 April and I began installing our exhibition today.

We have put together a mother-daughter show of new hand stitched quilts. 

Earlier and Later is the title we chose for it.  

The curator, Robyn Wilcox, figured out the placement.  My husband Ned was first assistant.

April's quilts dance into a future.  My quilts are steeped in my personal history.  April and I are part of a long tradition of creativity, women makers, and the passing on of skills. It's exciting for the two of us to be showing together at the Craft Ontario gallery in the city of Toronto.  I'm very proud of her and of our rich relationship.  

The opening reception is in one week in the early evening of  June 18.  Our joint talk with the curator is on June 20 at 2 pm.  

The Beauty of the Green Earth,
 hand stitched quilt, Tree Everlasting pattern
 by Judy Martin 2026

Feminine Writing: The House With the Golden Windows

the house with the golden windows

 

In 1993 I made a paper and canvas piece entitled The House With the Golden Windows.  It was inspired by a childhood memory from when our family drove home from Fort Frances.  My mother would half turn her head from the front seat and point at the small farm houses set back from the road, their windows glinting from the late afternoon sun. “Look at the golden windows” she said.

Last week I found an envelope of black and white photos of the house. I'd like to talk about them in today's blog post.   

Helene Cixous

This art piece is an example of Feminine Writing, described by the important French philosopher / intellectual / writer, Helene Cixous. (born 1937)   She said: 

The feminine writer, like a mother, looks with a look that recognizes, studies, respects, doesn’t take, doesn’t claw, but attentively, with gentle relentlessness, contemplates and caresses, bathes, and makes the other shine.  She brings back to light the life that has been buried.  She signs its name.  

I believe that this sewn house is feminine writing because it shines a light on the domestic day to day.  It makes that daily life shine while using feminine techniques and materials.  

For one year, I took a photo every day from within the house I lived in with my family in Kenora, Ontario.  Every day I chose an interesting or beautiful sight from one of the windows, and then snapped it with my film camera.  Although the east side of the house did not have many windows I did take a few from the window over the kitchen sink that looked directly at where the neighbour kept his garbage cans.  

However, my favourite view was of the back yard.  It could be seen from the many north windows and most of the 365 photos are from the north side of the house.  

the north wall interior

I was a mother artist when I made this piece.  You can see the children's sandbox from the north facing windows.  The house was finished in time to exhibit it in the Lakehead University degree show in the spring of 1993.  We moved to Manitoulin that same year.    

this detail of the north window shows the maple tree and the neighbour's fence

I didn’t realize that was to be our last year in the house when I began taking those photos. 

the house with the golden windows, 1993

The house is an installation.  I wanted to make a piece of art that would require my viewer to move around it in order to understand it.  I wanted that same viewer to enter into the house and feel some kind of emotion.  I wanted my viewer to experience my work with the body.

Ann Hamilton

Ann Hamilton, (born 1956), was working with the idea of the body as a way of knowing during that time.  There was an article about her installations in an early 90's  Fiber Art magazine when I was just coming up with the idea to make this house.  Although I wasn't yet familiar with Helene Cixous, I knew about Ann Hamilton.    

When we experience something with the senses (smell, touch, hearing, sight)  and also with movement, we become open.  We receive and resonate.  We experience a poetic recognition.   

Louise Bourgeois

Another artist that has influenced me when I was making the House with the Golden Windows is Louise Bourgeois. (1911 - 2010)   Her art helped her deal with her emotions.  She needed to make art. 

She also expected her viewer to have an emotional response to her work.  She famously said, "If you are not touched by my work, then I have failed."  

Femme Maison  1946
 by Louise Bourgeois

Louise Bourgeois was 35 years old and was raising three boys when she made this piece.  She believed that the domestic world of a mother artist was worth making art about.    

“Art is not about art. Art is about life, and that sums it up."  she said. 

But what emotion do you think Louise Bourgeois is communicating with her image of a woman squeezed into a building?  She made other Femme Maison pieces. See here. 

This house is about domesticity, yet it is not a domestic object.

This piece was made for an art gallery.  The reason that I don't have good photos of it is that it needs an art gallery kind of space to install it in.  

I believe that quilts are art.  I have always believed that.  By making an installation like this, obviously for exhibition, I help others to realize that sewing and patchwork are valid techniques for art making.  

I turned 40 in 1991, and was just beginning to take ownership of the idea that I could be an artist and a mother at the same time.  I leaned into art as a kind of salvation.  I didn’t keep my art passion a secret from the family, but I also didn’t talk about it.  I did it.  I also did my best to be a good mother.  I don't know how I did it now that I look back.  People ask.

I do know that my art was and is a place for me to be truly me.    

World of Threads installations and weaving from the USA, Spain, Finland and Canada

Pacific Ocean by Bonnie J Smith, California USA

Indigo dyed  cloth and thread 

While walking along the shore every day I gaze to the west and view the vastness and beautiful Pacific Ocean.   

My thoughts while creating this installation were for the viewer to love the Pacific Ocean as much as I do.  My belief is that when someone loves something they will also want to take care of it.

Ecologically all oceans represent what is happening on this earth.  Let us keep them in great shape for future generations.  Bonnie J. Smith

Hand Woven Tapestries by Anna Kocherovsky from Michigan USA.  Anna used wool, linen, cotton and metallic threads for all these pieces.  

Pictured above:  Travel Diary, Fox and the Forest (two panels). Star Light, Star Bright

Star Light, Star Bright by Anna Kocherovsky 

The Memory of Nature  Jaizkibel III by Lourdes Elizalde from Basque Country, Spain

Handwoven tapestry, plain weave and soumak technique, wool, cotton, silk threads

Inspired by my love and concern for Mother Nature, my desire is to express an intimate, joyful and deep sensation.  Climb those cliffs, enter their hollows, feel the sun on your back and the humidity in the shadiest areas.  Touch the roughness and feel the softness of the sandstone slipping through your hands.   

detail of  Memory of Nature by Lourdes Elizalde

installation by Theda Sandiford from Jersey City, USA.

(made from black zip ties and library ladders)

Her statement:  Racial gaslighting hides in plain sight in everyday conversations.  It subtly shifts dialogue from a raciesst topic at hand onto me, the accuser, forcing me to question and re-assess my response to racism, rather than racism itself.  "are you sure it was about race?"  "I'm sure he/she/they didn't mean it like that."  These comments are a convenient way for people to avoid uncomfortable conversations about race.  The questioning, twisting, and undermining of my truth, manifests in insomnia and anxiety.  In this installation, zip tie blankets draped on library ladders expose the sting of micro-aggressions to dispose of this trauma.

Laurentian Forest

installation by Ixchel Suarez from Oakville, Ontario

cotton, silk, wool, linen, jute, tulle, rope, raffia, human hair, all hand stitched

The soft sculptures presented in Laurentian Forest interconnect trees, forests, and our bodies, visually weaving human-nature bonds.  They reflect on time's juxtaposition with nature, mirroring our evolving, aging, and transient existence within the natural world.  This art prompts contemplation of impermanence and fragile beauty.  It serves as a visual narrative bridging time and nature, inviting viewers ot escape into the timeless harmony between them.  Ixchel Suarez

The Pure Soul in a Dream by Paivi Vaarula, Finland

One morning I woke up and the shade of a dream was still floating in my mind.  There was this person with such a pure soul.  I just had to translate that into a textile.  I chose transparent and white wool yarns and woe these wings to reflect the dream I had.  

Handwoven on a floor loom, the folds  were stabilized by steaming.

 Time of Joy by Paivi Vaarula from Hameenlinna, Finland

Everyday life consists of joys and sorrows.  In this work, I interpret those moments of joy.  My starting point was the joyful times with my sons.  I dyed the yarns with natural dyes, wove the fabric with a traditional floor loom and steamed the folds to stabilize the form.

World of Threads in Oakville, Ontario Canada, is on view until January 14, 2024.  

To move slowly alongside

The solitude and quiet emptiness that I find on Manitoulin continues to be very important to my development as an artist.  I intentionally withdraw from people and put a lot of time into my work.  I touch my work a lot as I stitch it.

My pieces are large and simple, which makes it easy for my viewer to enter them.  They are safe, calm places.   I consider them a gift and am generous with the labour I put into my work.

I am planning an installation that uses old wool blankets to make a monumental walk-through corridor.  The rock cuts along the new highway 400 are the inspiration for this new work.  In northern Ontario, large areas of the Canadian Shield have been sliced open by blasting and heavy equipment to reveal eons of time and layers of beautiful sediment and crystals and minerals.

From the speeding car, we are able to look with awe at these magnificent grand pieces of Canada.  Trees grow on top of some of them.  There is something spiritual within these rock cuts.  The car keeps on moving.

My installation of blankets will encourage people to walk slowly alongside at an intimate closeness to the work.   I hope that people will experience the scale and weight of the familiar wool fabric, with their bodies.  Yearning to touch but not touching, and somehow feeling some deep truth of lived emotions that are part of our human experience.

The installation will have two parts, each part made from two or three blankets sewn together and bordered top and bottom with still more blanket cloth.  One part is shown in this post, and it measures 14 feet wide and 10 feet high.  The nick name for this part is Ash and Rose.

Blankets are already full of human time before I work with them.  Generations of time.  The marks of those hands and bodies have left signs of wear and all I have done is add more time and touch with hand stitch.  Both sides.

Materials such as blankets that relate to our universal human experiences in bed where things like birth, death, power or lack of power, pain, comfort, protection, and sex happen, are powerful metaphors.  Making crafted objects from them is contemporary art.

I work with hand stitch and used domestic cloth.
I make hand made things that invite the use of all our senses, especially the sense of touch. 

the healing machine

the healing machine , individual component, baling wire, aluminum foil

This post is about Emery Blagdon's Healing Machine.

the artist believed that his art could cure people

When Emery Blagdon was 48, he started building the healing machine and continued for 31 years until he died in 1986.  He lived in Nebraska and created an environment in a shed creating sculptures made of baling wire, aluminum foil, hand-painted lightbubs, salts, and bright paintings of geometric shapes.

Blagdon believed he was sensitive to electrical current and was investigating the curative powers of  this unseen force.  He hoped that the objects he made might ease human pain and suffering.

Portrait of Emergy Blagdon with his works in progress by Sally and Richard Greenhill 1979

In 1979, a couple from England, Sally and Richard Greenhill, came to Nebraska to photograph the artist.

view of Emery Blagdon's shed with installation of more than 300 hanging and standing sculptures made from bailing wire and aluminum foil

After his death, Emery Blagdon's work was collected together by his friends, including Dan Dryden.  The Kohler foundation acquired the work in 2004 and after conservation, it became part of the John Kohler Arts Center's permanent colleciton.  This includes the workshop and 400 constructions, paintings, and other components.  It is on view until July 1 2018.

It is fascinating that he had the idea that static electricity and its emanating aura would cure those who experience both physical and emotional suffering and so created these fantastical objects.

painted light bulbs

painted wood with nails and thread

His paintings of concentric circles and angualr lines seem to generate power and reflect it outwards.

the healing machine indvidual component, baling wire, wood, aluminum foil sculpture by Emery Blagdon

Astonishing
Here is another article about this artist, and an audio.

a visionary art environment

I was most attracted to the sculptures that used masses of repeated small and interesting shapes.  These were carefully placed within each of the "pretties" (his word for the individual components) so that they channel the earth's natural magnetic energy.  Read more here.

I had to go experience this exhibition twice and still walked away in awe.