tuesdays in 2022

This post is about journal writing and journal re-reading, both important to my daily practice.

The wool quilt in the top image has been unfinished for years.  This year I'd like to finish quilting it and write more about it, but not today.  

Today, I've chosen just one photo from the first Tuesday of 2022, and another from the second Tuesday, and another from the 3rd Tuesday etc. for six Tuesdays total.  It astounds me how quickly time goes past and how my projects whirl around.  I abandon ideas as quickly as I start new ones.  Flitting from one thing to another keeps my work exciting but may also be my greatest handicap.  Accompanying each image is text from my written journal of the appropriate Tuesday.  Not the whole text - that would be too much.  I am sharing just an inkling.   One of them is a quoted poem, another is a description of two sketches.  They represent my daily notebooks.  I don't know what else to say.  

January 4, 2022: Water colour on paper

You never know.  You have to tiptoe to the edge and then continue on.  Tiptoe, tiptoe…. hands gesturing in front of you in case there is something cold and dangerous at this edge.

I feel blind.  I have to trust.  I’m timid but I’m brave.  

January 11, 2022:  bundled gunnera leaves, alpaca roving, naturally dyed wool, work in progress

Yesterday, I finally made it back into the town studio after months away.  It is a bit overwhelming.  All the stuff here.  Some abandoned pieces from the In The Middle of the World body of work, some stuff that we moved here as a way to get it out of bedrooms for the  Christmas visitors.  All my blanket wool is here and the dyed sheer cloth and several quilt tops that need backs.   A LOT of stuff. 

My journal from 1991 – 1992 was still open on the main table.  I’ve changed how I read these old journals so I brought it home and am now going through it and typing it into the laptop and wow it is inspiring.  

January 18:  sunshine and more sunshine hand pieced quilt top

I’m packing up Maia’s birthday gift (drawing supplies) and also some for Aili.  An orange for Suvi.   Also fresh chocolate chip cookies for Maia and some photos of their dad, two-year-old Jay, making pizza in Kenora when my mother came to visit and brought a kit.  My mother would have been such a good grandma if she hadn’t gotten sick.  Except her plan had been to live in B.C. alone, if she had not gotten sick. We never know each day ahead.  We need to carry on bravely.

I put my sunshine and more sunshine top into a brilliant yellow green backing cloth in the studio yesterday and today I’ll baste them together.  I'll listen to Possession some more while I do this, after the dentist appointment.

january 25:  elder sculptures in progress, old quilts that I have mended or otherwise altered

 As I read through my old journals this year I am finding so much that seems really important.  A life story full of drama.

Today from 2005, there is a sketch from the Telos book,  Art Textiles Japan volume 2 of the central figure in Scene of White by Noriko Narahira.  This sketch is evidence of how moved I was by the idea of a hanging female empty garment shape and how it influenced me.  I used it in my dissertation six years later.  When I worked towards the in the middle of the world exhibition last fall, I created four cloaks that were so important and new for that exhibition and I can understand now the influence of Narahira's work.  

Now, coming across that sketch again, I’m affirmed to continue with these kinds of sculptures.  I'm making Elders from old quilts.  Textiles that are older than I am.  I learn from them.  

February 1:  the mended butterfly quilt and an unfinished Amish wool quilt on our bed

A full page ball point pen sketch of a new sun quilt I plan to make.  The sun will be made from wedges left over from mending the butterfly quilt arranged in radiating circles and edged with triangle rays.  It is set low on a horizon.  There are some outline circles cut into the sky behind it and below the horizons are rows and rows of more wedge-shaped triangles.  Words are scribbled over the sketch.  

A second smaller ball point pen sketch takes up about 1/3 of the facing page.  This sketch is of another sun quilt but the sun is a bit larger and is centered in a square.  The wedges in this sun are pointier and larger than the first sketch.  A yellow sun in a yellow sky.  Yellow velvet dots, prairie point triangle edge.

I envision myself high up above, hovering in the sky. I drop my arm to softly create a new stitch.   Orchestrating each as one long continuous thread, I am like the moon, pulling and pushing the tides, rhythmic and pliant. Amber Jensen    

February 8:  a messy red thread nest on white handkerchief linen

A poem from the book Inside the Visible edited by Catherine de Zegher

All things

Are too small

To hold me,

I am so vast

In the Infinite

I reach

For the Uncreated

I have

Touched it,

It undoes me

Wider than wide

Everything else

Is too narrow

You know this well,

You who are also there

Hadewijch II 13th century 

beauty binds us together

 What is ordinary daily life anyway?

Breakfast – housecoats – diapers – bath – crying – cleaning up 

TV  - tea – reading stories – snowsuits – writing letters, reading letters,

holding babies, making sandwiches – heating soup 

 folding corduroys – sorting socks – tea – coaxing two year olds

 listening to seven year olds – thinking – quilting – my art 

the radio – the window – the dishwasher 

thinking – jotting down ideas – peeling vegetables

pouring milk – talking – piano lessons – undressing – sex

How would I define myself?

I would have to answer ‘ a mother ‘

When you have a seven-month-old baby, it does really occupy you the most. 

But I feel that I am an artist too.  I can’t call myself one this year though. 

 Now I am first a mother.

Journal Text from December 13 1987 

Images of stitching and nature walks from this week.

 

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

truth telling

I went into the studio last week and pinned things up and looked.

I thought the dotted sheer panels I made last summer were finished pieces in themselves, but now I know better.  They are layers.  I look and I move things around and look some more.

Sometimes I just look.  

Stumped.

I would like to speak honestly about blogging.  

Writing  this blog seems hard lately and I am going to take a sabbatical from the writing part of it.  I will still post photos of my work, but please don't expect me to write.  I can't.

And there is something else.  

Recently, I've received emails that let me know that my blog is not working.  People have been asking for help with comments or following.  Blogger won't let them in anymore.  I don't know what has changed. 

 Come over to instagram with me. It's easier.  My handle there is @judithemartin

from 2008 journal:  Accept me.  Love me.  Who am I from the inside out?  I am enough as I am. 

time passes so quickly

Day by day it flies by, change happens.
Babies are born, they learn to speak, to walk,
then suddenly they are living four time zones away.

But things don't really change.
The sun gets up and goes down, the moon continues its 28 day cycle.
Ice comes into the lake and then goes out,
geese fly north in the spring, south in the fall.

I want to hold time.  It is so precious.

meanwhile

 

Dear journal
It's been a week since I last wrote.

I've been working at collecting images to upgrade my website so it has been busy.
This blog rarely posts my finished work.
If I want to share finished work, I need an organized site.

But it is computer work and that gives me a neck ache.

Seeing artwork in real life (irl) is so much better.

All this week I've stayed indoors.
I've started to use the stationary bike again, after a long break from it.

The bike is in my studio so that while I do my pedaling,
I am able to look at what's on the design wall.

Penny and I are having another show together, and we've started planning more seriously.
I've been making brand new work for that, and feel happy. 

 

I'm  also getting to the edges of this sunny-rainy piece. 

It is becoming distorted.
I pull the threads very snugly to encourage the distortion
I stitch around thoe velvet rainy-mushroom shapes three times

 

 

 Not sure if I love it anymore.

 

meanwhile the world goes on
meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscape
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers....
mary oliver 

the images of the sweaters with holes are from the book, Habitus by Ann Hamilton.