Mended World is in Houston

I'd like to begin by thanking the over 100 women who came out to stitch not just this panel, but three more of similar size.  They came once a week for 4 years between 2009 and 2013.

 Please notice that most of the construction and the quilting is done by hand.

We called it the circle project, referring to the circle within a square archetype that makes up the design of all four panels.  Circle project also refers to us, the circle of women who stitched together.

We who made four large meditation panels that are permanently installed in the Little Current United Church on Manitoulin Island Canada.  A gift for our community.

This panel is named Mended World.

The circle area needed to be put together with a mending stitch - a back stitch - because all the little pieces would fall away from each other otherwise.  That circle area, the world area, needed extra care.

It is the making of this quilt that is the back story of Mended World.

Making as healing for the women who stitched and laughed together.  Making as healing for our planet.

I got an email over the wekend asking me to record an audio statement for the International Quilt Festival special exhibition, Masterworks: Abstract &Geometric.  These recordings will eventually become  available through the SAQA website.   Here's mine if you want to hear my voice. xo

The text in this post is my 90 second sound bite for Mended World.  (A big Thank You to my local community for loyal support.)

Mended World on the dining room table

I brought Mended World home from the church so that I could package it up for exhibition at the International Quilt Festival in November.

Having it on the dining table rather over whelmed me.
There is so much touch in this piece.
So much time.
So much attention and intention.
It's 94 inches square.  Full image here.

In 1977, Adrienne Rich wrote about women's tasks.  She included world protection, world preservation and world repair in her list.

This quilt is made from donated or thrift shop table linens.  Over 100 people worked on it.

Mended World is the second panel (of four) in the Manitoulin Circle Project.  It was installed in the sanctuary of Little Current United Church in 2012.       

In 1971, Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro initiated Woman House, "a repository of the daydreams women have as they wash, bake, cook, sew, clean and iron their lives away"

Repairing the world while sewing our lives away.

My densely stitched quilts are so sensuous
they yearn to be touched

How many of them will it take to mend the world?

How many of them can I day dream my life away in?

opening the door

 Trinity came back from exhibition in Vancouver and I was able to touch it again.

(now when i don't know what to do next

taking space between thoughts

pausing,

looking at the sky a lot )

I needed to re-place the velcro strip
and re-mount the textile on it's supporting board,
and then return it to the local church's pulpit.

(just being present

and having self confidence

even while not knowing)

In the book, MY RELIGION, Leo Tolstoy implies that whatever happens in a violent revolution, there will also be an inner and hidden revolution in the people, out of which a new religion will be born which  will have the same effect of making life possible as the Christian religion used to.

We shall have had enough of cynicism, scepticism and humbug, and will want to live more musically.  How will this come about, and what will we discover?  

Instead of seeing absolutely nothing in the future other than the disasters that are bound to strike the modern world and civilization like so many thunderbolts, through revolution or war or the bankruptcy of worm eaten states. 

 Vincent Van Gogh letter to his brother Theo September 24 1888

(being kind to myself

becoming kinder to others

opening that door more and more

seeing what happens when I don't protect myself so much )

signed

judy evelyn grandmom

Lucy Wallis' quilt

Judy Martin home studio  collected inspiration wall

Lucy Wallis Circle on Square I 1984,  taffeta, velvet and cotton

This quilt by Lucy Wallis has been very important to me.
I saw it in a book published in 1990 entitled Quilts: The James Collection.
There is not much information about it.  Most of the text in the book is in Japanese.
Lucy Wallis lived on a farm in Somerset England when she made this quilt.
Apparently she made another similar quilt, but I have not seen it.

Circle on Square I by Lucy Wallis, page 108 and 109 in Quilts: The James Collection

By 1991 I had already discovered Lenore Tawney's amazing circle in square weavings (here's one) but this was the first time I felt that a quilt pulled off this important archetype.

Quilts: The James Collection  1990 Kokusai (published in Japan)

The book is still available online (at reasonable cost), and the actual quilt is part of the James Collection, International Quilt Study Museum in Lincoln Nebraska.  The museum dates Lucy's quilt at 1987 and orients it differently than the book.   see here

Judy Martin' collection of inspiration wall in home studio

I've used a large photo of the Lucy Wallis quilt for teaching purposes and came across that photo last week.  I pinned it on my studio wall.  (view old wall here)

Judy age 7 or 8 

This wall holds a collection of photos and momentos that I find such as this birthday card I made for my dad when he turned 86.

top: Aino Sibelius, the Finnish composer's wife
 middle, Lucy wallis's quilt Circle On Square I,
bottom Rothko's Orange and Tan 1954 oil on canvas

There is a narrow place by the closet that I use for 4 x 6 images.  Lucy's quilt has been here for a good long time, along with a quote by Jeanette Winterson and a photo of me from grade 9.

Judy Martin age 14 (new haircut)

Mended World, part of the community stitch project (2009-2013) is a response to Lucy Wallis' beautiful, complicated use of cloth and stitch.

Lucy Wallis Circle on Square I  detail  taffeta, velvet, machine embroidery (I believe)

Thank you Lucy.

And here's the Jeanette Winterson quote

Life has an inside as well as an outside.  Consumer culture directs all resources and attention to life on the outside.  What happens to the inner life?Art is never a luxury because it stimulates and responds to the inner life.    We are badly out of balance.

I don't think of art/creativity as a substitute for anything else.  I see it as a powerful expression of our humanity - and on the side of humanity under threat.  

If we say art is a luxury, we might as well say that being human is a luxury.

side tracked

In 2012 I wrote myself a mission statement that went something like this:  "I wish to create immense cloths that are beyond my reach in any direction and from afar seem to be empty, but, like nature, are actually covered with unique and repeated small marks."

Since then I have only completed one piece that fulfills that mandate.  Beginning with Time.  Side tracked by bubbling ideas, I've made smaller pieces ( Starry Night.  Yin Yin  ) that are ideal for group exhibitions,

and I made teaching samples. (shown in this post)

When I was invited to teach a design workshop at Fibrearts Newfoundland based on the  meditation panels of the circle project , I went into a flurry of producing art works that expanded on the stitches we used.  These 'samples' show how basic stitches and simple design principles can be used to express an original voice.

Both the blue moon folder (above)  and the dark dream cloth (below on left) were made to demonstrate how the archetype of a circle within a square can be a starting point for design.

 They a-wait finishing.

French knots were used in grid formations in both Earth Ark and Layers of Time.   To show a different way to use it, I made a murmuration of stitch.  (above on right)

 It a-waits finishing.

To expand on the reverse applique dot that makes up the lower half of Precious Water I worked up a whole cloth piece from organic cotton and commercial batiks.  It a-waits finishing.

The velvet sample shown above (the smaller piece) was made to demonstrate stitch and flip over foundation,  the main technique for Mended World.   It still needs to be completed.

Although I enjoy the connections I make through teaching and love sharing my passion for these easy techniques with like-minded individuals and I am pleased with the samples I made this year. (I would not have thought of them without the prep for teaching)  I want to leave behind a body of work made up of large pieces that communicate my ideas about intimacy of the hand's touch within the immensity we feel when alone in nature.

If I were younger and the days were longer, I believe that I would say yes more often to teaching.

Old Photographs

I have been going through photos as I prepare for the workshop next week, and came across some working photos of the circle panels that might have been shown on this before, I can't remember. If so, hope you don't mind if I share them now.  The first one (above) is from 2010 -  just before the Earth Ark panel went into the frame.  I had it at home and was tidying up the inside of all the pieced triangles.

The photo above is also from 2010.  It has the Earth Ark central circle pinned up in front of some other circular work I was making at the same time - when I had that lovely studio in town with the ten foot walls and great light. The quilt in the back is Cross My Heart, my Quilt National 2011 piece before it was so drastically trimmed.  Still wish I hadn't done that.

The above photo surprised me.  I had forgotten that I had even pinned these parts to the wall.  The black pieced section is now arranged vertically and has found a place in my new dream cloth.  The white pieced sections are sections of the earth ark panel's lower half - I believe this pattern of half square triangles is called Broken Dishes.  The urn has gone through many transformations and has been over-dyed.  I'm not finished with it yet.

 These next two photos are from the summer of 2011 when i finished up the quilting of the 'heaven' area (made from women's handkerchiefs) in the quilt hoop, not the frame.  I took it to the cottage.  The curvy lines were inspired by the skies in Emily Carr's paintings.

The panels from the Manitoulin Circle Project have been exhibited in galleries and Karen Thiessen of Day In & Day Out Blog (on my sidebar) came to the opening of the Mended World exhibition when it was in Kitchener.  She has just published three insightful reviews on her blog that can be accessed from this link.  I also put the same link (and two more found photos from 2011) on my updates blog  here.  Thank you Karen.

string piece with foundation

 I'm teaching the string piece on foundation technique in Newfoundland next month.

This is the technique used in Mended World, one of the Manitoulin Circle Project panels. (detail shown above)

The 'strings' in this technique are long and narrow strips of fabric.  These yellow ones (and the ones in the Mended World panel) were cut with a rotary cutter and a ruler.  However, one could use scissors, or a cutter with no ruler.

Claire Wellesely-Smith wrote about Mended World in her new book, Slow Stitch.  She says:

"Using a sewing machine, four or five long narrow strips of a variety of textured damasks (from recycled tablecloths) were sewn together along their long edges to create a new striped fabric. This fabric is then re-cut several times and sewn back together to make a wide piece of new fabric."

This striped fabric is then cut with scissors to make new strings that have many seams.

These new strings are then stitched into a new sheet of tiny squares using the stitch and flip method on foundation.  The light weight foundation used in this yellow sample is harem cloth.  The foundation used in Mended World was cotton lawn.  

Daughter April used this string piece on foundation method for her multi coloured quilt.  A difference is that she worked from scrap and made each of her strings all by hand.  She used the flip and stitch method to attach her unique strips together, her foundation cloth is a thrift store cotton sheet.

How to sew:
Begin with two strips right sides together laid in the center of your foundation.  Sew them together along a seam through three layers.

Open the two strips out. Flatten with your hand.  Lay a third strip face down along one of the strip sand sew along that seam line through all three layers.   Open out.  Repeat.  Work your way with alternate sides towards the edges of your foundation cloth.

I wrote more about the book Slow Stitch here.
Also, may I direct your attention to Karen Thiessen's blog, Day In & Day Out where she has begun a series of reviews about the meditation panels.  The first one is here.  The second one is here.