The Immensity Work

the cloud in me in the outdoor gallery

Immensity is within ourselves.  It is attached to a sort of expansion of being that life curbs and caution arrests, but which starts again when we are alone.”    Gaston Bachelard   The Poetics of Space.

These pieces from 2017 seem empty, but are in actuality filled with textural small marks put there one at a time with hand stitch.  I’ll never be finished with exploring the immensity within.    

longing cloth

longing cloth (verso)

 Longing Cloth 

I feel that yearning is our strongest emotion, more powerful than love itself.  I used indigo dyed velvet because it is such a sensual fabric to touch and a bright red inner layer, revealed by cutting away some of the cloth in the reverse of the piece. 

the cloud in me

 Luce Irigaray’s book To be Two  has a section about women and men and how each has a unique and huge interior life. 

"Each remote from the other, we are kept alive by an insuperable gap.  Nothing can ever fill it.  Is it because I do not know you that I know you are?  How do I protect without restraining?  You remain a mystery to me.  Our union will always remain a mystery.  Such is the union between woman and man.  I want to live in harmony with you and still remain other.  I want to draw nearer to you while protecting myself from you.  In which part of myself do I preserve you?  In which breath?  

How do I remain without suffocating? How do I make earth out of air and protect the cloud in me?  Neither mine nor yours but each living and breathing with the other.  What makes me one, and perhaps unique, is that you are, and I am not you.” 

I had to do some reflecting this past week because I'm being interviewed by Sophie Anne Edwards at the Art Gallery of Sudbury on Saturday and I remembered the thesis for my Fine Art degree from Middlesex University and the work that came from that.  

The whirl of 2024

January 14  1:50 pm

February 16  7:16 am

March 14   7:22 am

April 9   8:09 am

May 15  6:54 pm

June 12  8:25 am 

July 14  8:48 am

August 16  6:23 am 

September 23  9:34 am

October 7  6:48 pm

November 10  7:12am

December 21 4:34 pm

I thought about using this space to show the interior of my house with all the finished and unfinished quilts piled up or unfolded across beds and chairs and on the floor and on the wall, because then you might understand how much work I do and how I am always busy ....but...

this constant view of the Wikwemikong peninsula across the water of Manitowaning Bay is truer.  

I stare out the window half the time it seems.   That colour full sky gives me an answer, even when I didn't really ask a question.  Here it is.  

Here is the answer.  Our lives are fragile and our timelines are speeding forward.  We must be kind to each other and kind to ourselves.

It often does seem like there is an urgency to get things done, made, out there, but really, there is no rush.  Don't rush. Go slow.   I wish for you, my dear and appreciated blog readers, the very best for the new year.  Be tender.  Be slower.  Allow softness and kindness to rule.  Let's care.

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.

 

like breakfast, lunch and dinner

Q  Where do you find inspiration?

A   I am inspired by two things.  The first is the ever-changing natural environment I live within.  All seasons are beautiful.  The air is beautiful, affected by the time of day and the light, the growth and decay of the vegetation are beautiful, the way that colours look next to each other because of the way the angle of sunlight touches them, that's beautiful.

The empty spaces, and the birds on the tops of trees, also beautiful.

These things feed me like breakfast, lunch and dinner.  I don't consciously try to reproduce them in my work, but they show up in an abstract way.  They have become part of me.  Enhanced by my chosen solitude while walking, driving, sitting in my chair, observing and breathing in nature, is all so beautiful.

The second thing is looking at art.

I especially like looking at large-scale textile sculptures and minimalist contemporary paintings.  I enjoy Instagram and follow many artists there from around the world.  I also own a sizable art-book collection that I flip through a lot.  I have several books about  traditional American Quilts (including the Gee Bend artists) as well as many visual artists that I love such as Cy Twombly, Kiki Smith, Louise Bourgeois, and Michelle Stuart.  

This is the first post I've done using the photo software on my laptop - I'm still working things out, but thought I'd share how it was here last week on the island.  

 

winter in Canada

stitched in car again today

soft

 I wanted my quilt, Soft Summer Gone, to have a kind of timelessness, as if it has always been.

 I made it large and simple and open with emptiness.

 

 I coloured it with yellow golden-rod wildflowers gathered at the end of summer from the fields and ditches.

  I stitched it with large gestures that reached and crossed and with small circles that rose up.

 I wanted my viewer to yearn to touch the stitches and the soft cloth.

I hoped to cause a poetic experience deep within.

Quilt National sent our work back to us last week.
I unfolded her softly.  

The Expectations

 Expectations 1

 Expectations 2

 Expectations Christmas

The girls and I discussed our hopes and dreams last night.

How would I feel if I let expectations about my self go?

If I didn't expect myself to do so much stitching?
If I didn't expect myself to be vulnerable?