the gift of an extra day

 Leap Year 2016.

 An extra day's worth of time.  What a lovely gift.

Time is the main material in objects made by hand.
Most of my work is about making time visible.

Happy Leap Day!

time is the mother

most of November

My work is about time passing.  When I painted my four children I was really painting time.  Their time as youth. My time as a parent.  The daily sunlight. 

My journals record time.  The stitched journal 'Not To Know But To Go On' made time visible.

I am now considering returning to the millennium journal pieces I made fifteen years ago.  In 2007 I put the project away with twenty two panels left to stitch and am now thinking of completing them. Instead of separate wall hangings, I think that I will stitching all those months together.  The work would be an environment more than an installation.  It would be too large for a gallery - unless hung from the ceiling, allowed to drape, or be folded up.  myself.

Personal Language

Each panel also has a single meaningful word from each day couched onto the reverse side. Although this text is from my real life, there is not enough to tell a story and hopefully this mystery would encourage personal memories or stories.

Why complete this project now?     

It demonstrates my sustained interest in our the two sides - the inner interesting side as well as the more obvious outer side.  It also demonstrates my fascination with how fast time passes and my use of time as a material.

Is that enough?                            reflecting.

Eight years ago

I started this blog in March 2006.  (8 years!)   It is just one of many diaries I've kept over the years.

The very first post was about the Millennium Journal installation in Rail's End gallery in Haliburton. The very first photo in Judy's Journal  is the one of me shown above.

Millennium Journal was a daily record that used cloth shapes and hand stitch as a personal code that marked that I was alive during the turn of the millennium. (November 1999 until February 2002)
Twenty eight days were stitched into grids of red cloth and arranged as lunar months.   Most of the days remained unstitched, and were stacked on shelves.  (one is visible on the right wall in above photo)  

As usual for my work, these pieces had two sides.   An inner and an outer.

perfect days

perfect day December 30, 2000

At the turn of the millennium, I kept a daily journal of symbols and recorded my body moving through 1999, 2000 and 2001.

perfect day January 3, 2001

Images of millennium journal are here on my website ...thirteen years ago.  !!!     

perfect day January 11, 2001

During that period of my life, three things were necessary to be able to say I had a perfect day and mark it with a leaf shape. 

perfect day January 13, 2001.  Also creative day.

read my novel....have my walk....do my hand work.

extra perfect day, also creative January 14, 2001

Some things never change, do they?

What makes a perfect day for you?

For me, if I can do these three things.  Read some fiction, walk outside, and do some hand work, I consider my day to be perfect.

Thirteen years ago, I used this willow leaf shape to symbolize perfect days in the stitched journal I was making then..

I'm back with Dad  today.  Brought my book this time.

Any Human Heart

I read most novels slowly, disciplining myself to no more than 20 pages a day. I treat that time with the characters in the novel as a visit to another, separate place. I learn from novels and consider what I've read as how it relates to my life. Days that include a novel get close to being perfect. I just finished Any Human Heart by William Boyd, written as a journal kept by an English writer through every decade of the 20th century. He moved within cultural circles and over the course of the book drops names of acquaintances, (Virginia Woolf, Pablo Picasso, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Frank O'Hara) casually, and with a ring of truth. Throughout, he ponders the meaning of life.

from page 203
"Thank Christ, I didn't plant an oak. Is that a good definition of marking the aging watershed? That moment when you realize - quite rationally, quite unemotionally- that the world in the not-so-far-distant future will not contain you: that the trees you planted will continue growing but you will not be there to see them."

from page 401
"Those were the years when I was truly happy. Knowing that is both a blessing and a curse. It's good to acknowledge that you found true happiness in your life - in that sense your life has not been wasted."

Pictured are just some of the perfect days from the millennium journal I kept from November 1998 - February 2001.

my life

I emptied and sorted my quilt cupboard over the weekend. I came across this enlarged negative of Oona in her high school graduation robes that I had planned to stitch to fabric. And the red thread baby I embroidered onto her muslin dress. The wrappings done the year my mother died. I did two things. The first was to take the quilts made before 1998 out and put them into a downstairs cupboard. The second was to re-organize the Millennium Journal stacks of fabric. Eight panels of 28 days each were stitched together, but that still leaves a lot of days between November 1998 and February 2001. Twenty-two months are just stacked. My life is in this work.

reminds me

Because I'm preparing for the trunk show on Thursday I rummaged through my piles of recent work. When I unfolded three of the millennium journals I came across "Trees in Winter", the panel that I worked on in early 2007 during the difficult time when my mother was dying. She would ask me "Where's your stitching?" when I came in to sit with her and I'd take it out. I stitched and we breathed together. Reading these snippets of couched text brings back that intense time in my life. It's revealing to me that there are spelling mistakes in many of the words. Several i's are not dotted, t's not crossed.

Do you ever borrow from other cultures in your work?

Personal Language: Millennium Journal (stitched 2006)

I’ve felt so much power within the art from other cultures that I’ve wanted to have that same kind of power in my own work. I taught myself how to dye, paint and print fabrics like they do in Japan, Australia, or Africa, and how they do mirror and kantha embroidery in India and Pakistan. I was looking for a way to have my own work enter the intuitive and abstract.

I admit that I felt that these ways of working were available to me to use in my art just as much as the western realist tradition was available to me. From the very beginning of my quilt making I realised that all those triangles and squares and circles have been around the world FOREVER as a language. They were not used as much in the ‘civilised’ world of Greek/Renaissance tradition. Those repeated geometric shapes are the basis of traditional quilt pattern. I was able to understand my own tradition of north American quilt design better by learning the variety of meanings the shapes had in other cultures. I’ve used these first shapes like a code.

It’s that secret language that I love about primitive art. However, I see now that in a modernist sense, what I was doing was using the ‘other’ way of seeing the world. I still want to continue to borrow repeated arrangements of first shapes and shiny surfaces because I believe it to be a multicultural language that can be understood by all of us in the world. Aren’t we are all ethnic?

peace

What kind of life experience is being depicted?

looking

“The artist who paints the emotions creates an enclosed world. Such an artist spends a great deal of time looking – both around him and inside him”.

Pierre Bonnard

Super Perfect

I had a perfect day today.
It's been so long since I've been able to do all three of these things.
Read my novel
go on my walk
and do some hand work.
In fact it was super perfect
because I spent some time in my new studio as well.

both ideology and aesthetics

I always try to connect both ideology and aesthetics in my work as a painter or a sculptor. I am very much interested in this specific relationship. Aesthetics alone are not enough for me and a message alone is just propaganda.
Ghada Amer

real life

We have had such a rich summer, full of family and being outdoors. I feel very lucky to have been able to spend so much time with my children, my siblings, my father and especially my grandson. However, watching teenagers with school bags walking along Toronto's Mount Pleasant Blvd on Tuesday made us realize that we have been avoiding reality. Yesterday, Ned and I drove the ten hours from Kingston to Manitoulin and filled the time with Kate Atkinson's audio book Case Histories . We had a lovely dinner with rasberry pie at the Valois restaurant in Mattawa, and stopped every now and then along the way to sretch our aching legs. The trip north began with highway 15 so that we could go through Almonte. I wanted to pick up my Millennium Journal exhibition and also meet Michael Rikley, the new curator of the Mississippi Valley Textile Museum. Now we are home and there are twenty one voice messages to go through, most of them about piano lessons. Back to real life.

two weeks remain

It's hard to remember that I have work still on exhibit in Almonte, Ontario. About a month ago the acting curator, Erin Snow, sent me an email about response to the work.

"I have had a lot of people coming up to me to comment on how much they like the Millennium Journal, but almost all of them have no words to describe what they think by the time they come back downstairs! I have heard a lot of people repeating “wow” and “amazing” etc. They really are being blown away by it. However, that is the most coherent info I can get out of them! Glancing through the guest book it looks like most of the comments written there are similar. So, as I expected, everyone is really loving this exhibition. I think in general that visitors are overwhelmed with the immensity of the project as a whole and the quality of the exhibition, which is why there are so many monosyllabic responses. Most of our visitors are not used to seeing this amount of work done by a single person, especially anything with such depth."

Millennium Journal runs until July 29 at the Mississippi Vallety Textile Museum.

Two exhibitions

Here is how curator Ivan Jurakic titled the exhibition in Cambridge - up until June 23.





Here is how Erin Snow titled the one in Almonte - up until July 29.

The Mississippi Valley Textile Museum

On Sunday I dropped off the millennium journal exhibition in Almonte, Ontario.




The beautiful stone building used to be a textile mill.
The Mississippi river rushes through the town, full of melt water.

Millennium Journal Exhibition

Here is the invitation for my exhibition in Almonte. I am managing to find some time to stitch on a new hanging for this show while here in Kingston. One definite advantage of textile art is that you can take it with you to the emergency ward!