magic safety net

 When I need to feel better, I make patchwork.

Attaching nine-patches to each other creates a kind of safety net.

When people ask me what I'm doing, I tell them I am sewing magic squares.

This quilt top has been in the works since 2014.  Now it's done.

It was with me during the broken leg.

It helped me get me through 10 days of this still rampant global pandemic.

The ice has started to go out on the bay in front of our house.

I sat for a while yesterday and listened to the ice cracking

and found a heart-shaped rock.

imagination is the star

"it goes on endlessly and one never gets to the place where the sun is setting but the red gets more and more intense"    Tove Jansson

This post is about a book.
Sculptor's Daughter (by Tove Jensson)
is written from a child's point of view. 
Child logic combines with adult wisdom and experience
and teaches the reader about art.

In fact, the book is a work of art.
It is a work about imagination.

"making a whole is very important.  Some people just paint things and forget the whole"
Tove Jansson

'The act of art becomes charged with power, then with failure.
We are up against mis-judgements, pre-conceptions, mis-interpretations, age-old entrenched beliefs, traditions, authorities, inevitable failures and competitions, and those games you have to play.' *

'A child, she reminds us, is refreshingly free from pre-conception - as well as a sponge for it.' *

We see the closedness of pre-conception and the child 's unknowing up against it. *

Sculptor's Daughter is full of images.

Darkness and light,
kindness and understanding,
objects and humans and emotions vivid and surreal.

The book makes us understand the importance and the fragility of our smallness.

It asks us to be alive to the imagination.

 It is full of flung-open windows.
Thrown-open doors. *

Tove Jansson has written a book that salvages and gives back to adults the child-sized truth about how things connect and how they mend.

How they continue.

I dream and my soul awakens.
Imagination is the star.    Carl Jung

The italics marked with * are by Ali Smith, and are taken from her introduction to Tove Jansson's memoir, Sculptor's Daughter.  I read it over Christmas when the children were home with their magical world.

The images are of some pieces I made in December while being a grandma and a hostess and a mother and I wasn't letting myself think too much. 

penny miranda studio visit

resting between night and day (left) resting at low tide (right) both pieces by Penny Berens

Penny Berens (above left) and Miranda Bouchard (right) came to visit on the weekend.    

Penny and I are having a show together in 2021 and Miranda has agreed to be our curator.

The work is still very much in progress.  

We met over the weekend to get a better sense of how it fits together and pinned our pieces up side by side on my pinwall. 

The blue piece in the above photo is Sky with Many Moons (Judy Martin)

We noticed contrasts and similarities in our work. 

My work is generally quite light, both in colour and weight (sometimes only one layer of sheer cloth).  It's usually quite tall.   I like people to look up at my work, as humans all over the world look at the moon.

I used to think of the sky as an invisible protective roof over the earth, my kids, everything.  I'm not sure that I still think like that.  Now I think of it more as magical, even spiritual, filled with star-dust. 
And spheres.

Above is a detail of Penny Berens' beautiful Whispering Cairns.

Penny's work for this show is more earthy.  She is thinking about the beauty of rocks and about the way they hold so much time.  She works with natural dyes too, but is adding more colour to her new work. In the piece in above photo, she says that she is thinking about "all the women who have gone before me in history"

Both Penny and I communicate our powerful love for the earth through the use of natural dyes and repetitive hand stitch / caress.

It's time to think more about caring.
We must care for the earth as lovingly as we take care of our bodies.
Many of us don't think about our bodies, yet still expect them to be ok.

We need to give ourselves self care.
We need to pay more attention.  To the earth and to our bodies.

penny and miranda with judy martin's work in progress

Miranda, our curator, says that she sees many simlarities in Penny and me as persons and artists.  

We both live in rural environments and are mothers and grandmothers.  

Our homes and yards where we each live are similar.

We both feel the presence and influence of a large body of water

We both have a country road, 

Penny lives near Annapolis Royal in Nova Scotia, while I live near Sheguiandah on Manitoulin Island.  Both places are steeped in history.  

We each have a long depth of life experience.  Some differences, but also many similarities. 

I like to think that my work is about reminding people how nature connects us to our interior selves when we stand still and look up and beyond the horizon while Penny's work is closer to what nature looks, smells, and feels like as we move within it, observing.

penny on left, judy on right - both works in progress

Our show will guide viewers through ideas that seem impossible to have at the same time: the swift passage of time that is being held for ages within the trees and rocks, the wounding self-awareness that comes over us when we look at the sky and understand that we are so small, yet immense within, full of past and present and future time.

Miranda told us that at times, to objectively see and speak about our work, she has to disconnect her eyes from her heart.

stone islands  by Penny Berens left, dark side of the sun by judy martin right

That's because there is an emotional power in work made with cloth and thread.
All that touching.  It goes deep.

judy martin,  miranda bouchard, penny berens  May 2019

Judy works from a combination of thought, research and poetry,
Penny observes her environment, says that she goes with the flow.

Both of us are star dust.  We all are.

Thank you to the Ontario Arts Council for funding Miranda in this curatorial project.