her vision grounds me

Stoney Island Memories 2019

Working alongside Penny Berens is one of the highlights of my career.  Noticing how she maintains her own heart felt vision helps to keep me grounded.  

It's easy for me to find artists in books who seem to know their own selves and are able to write about their making process and belief systems, but Penny is a real person with whom I can speak with on the phone.   I just spent nearly a week with her in Nova Scotia when we installed and spoke about our joint exhibition, In the Middle of the World. 

Resting Between Tides 2019

She notices details.    

Her work is drawn with needle and thread in her lap.  She does one artwork at a time. 

Each of her pieces is directly influenced by some particular event or sight or feeling that she has experienced.

Walking on Stoney Ground 2019

There's nothing general about her interpretations, although her works do have an atmosphere.

Our work complements each other because of the differences between our two approaches as much as because of the similarities.

When Autumn Leaves Fall 2017

Winter's Edge 2021

The large scale of my work makes an immediate impact on the viewer.  

My work communicates a lasting feeling of spirit and intimacy.  It sets you up to receive the details and imagination of her wall pieces, as you slowly move past them, one after the other.  

    

Details of Winter's Edge

You are ready to notice the details and the events and the change of seasons in her interpretations of nature.  

Also the boulders and the piles of smaller rocks.

The sun and the moon.

The wind and the beaches.  The grasses and the berries.

All the small repetitive marks that nature paints in the bush or on the beach are detailed in Penny's work and it is interesting to experience them, step by step, with close observation.

November Song 2024

detail of November Song

She says that she wants to work more abstractly and messier. 

The last thing she said to me when we hugged good bye was that she was going to start doing this right away.  She's five years older than I am and neither of us are going to retire.

I'm glad that she's only a phone call or a text message away.  She keeps me on track.  She encourages and inspires me.

Beaver Moon Dreaming 2020

I'm lucky to have an artist like her in my life. Making the two person exhibition together with her and also with our cheerleader and advocate, curator Miranda Bouchard, was an important step in both our creative practices.

Thank you for being real, Penny.  Thank you for being full of integrity and personal strength.

All artwork in this post is by Penny Berens.  More of this body of work can be seen on Modernist Aesthetic.  

In the Middle of the World was just installed in Nova Scotia.  Read Miranda Bouchard's curatorial statement and see my sculptural pieces at this link.   

Love Letters

 

This post is about the beautiful catalogue for the exhibition In the Middle of the World, featuring the hand stitched work of Canadian artists Penny Berens and Judith E Martin, with a scholarly essay by Miranda Bouchard, curator.   All images are from the catalogue, all text is from the final paragraphs of Miranda's essay. 

As testimonials to their processes, experiences, labours, and love, the works of Berens and Martin communicate uniquely and bravely about what it is to be human and alive in this world.

During a talk delivered in March 2020, Martin expressed,  "I believe that the results of our work will be felt and understood by new generations, some not yet born.  They will feel the love held in our stitches.  All of us, all of you, who make hand-made objects, have this belief.

We believe that our work will be understood and appreciated in the future.  In this way, our work is life-affirming and full of hope."  The works are love letters to people and planet that help us look simultaneously inwards at ourselves and to reflect outwards at and onto the world.

For years, the artists have pressed beyond the limits, expectations, and norms they've been confronted with to make their marks and do their work.  Throughout the development of In The Middle of the World, they've courageously stretched, testing the frontiers of their creative practices to make and share, keeping their notions of truth in sight.

The slow nurturance of the work reflects the value in moving ever onwards, in spite of time and fear, at an intuitive pace that privileges real relationships.  

These works invite us to consider the importance of caring for the Earth as lovingly and attentively as we care for our bodies, and of sharing stories and skills so they can be cherished now and into the future.

They dare us to be courageously vulnerable amidst all the mending that needs doing in the world.

Penny Berens and Judy Martin offer poignant reminders that creation is ongoing and never static, as are the living processes of relating to our true selves, to each other, and the worlds we find ourselves in as time continues to pass. 

This work is never - nor should it ever - be done.

The artists and curator acknowledge the support of the Ontario Arts Council during the long haul of preparing the exhibition and this publication.  

The complete catalogue can be viewed as a PDF, click here.  The soft cover book is 125 pages and is available for purchase.  Click here for more information.  

loss / beauty /our exhibition

There's a beautiful exhibition going on right now, miles away from me.  It's called In the Middle of the World and I'm really proud of the work in it and how it is installed.  

It feels a bit strange though, to have my work up on display there, and yet continue on with ordinary life here on Manitoulin.  

"There is such a shock after a show.  A show is an experience and after a show the artist is a different person.  He/she moves on.  So does the work."  

Louise Bourgeois said that in 1976.  It's how I'm feeling.

The exhibition is a two-person one with my colleague and good friend, Penny  Berens, who lives in Nova Scotia.  Penny and I discussed our work and how and where it would be shown with Miranda Bouchard, a free-lance curator who lives, as I do, in northern Ontario.  We both leaned on Miranda for layers of support.  

I wrote about Penny Berens's beautiful wall pieces on my Modernist Aesthetic blog.  Go see. 

 

I wrote about my sculptural textiles on Judy's Updates.  Go see that too, please.   I included my poetic artist statement in with the images, so that it would seem as if you are listening to someone read it into your head as you move through the exhibition.

let it all go 

the small middling tall bigger really the biggest and all things

let them go dear.

so comes love.

ee cummings 
 

All the images are from Manitoulin Island, taken from car windows during a drive with my husband last Sunday.  The stitching I had in my lap is a new piece, I don't know what it is about.  

boxes three and four : In the Middle of the World

 I am not like you, the old woman said slowly.

I do not tell stories.

I see visions.

I see that life is not a line, but a circle.

To be human is to be circled in the cycles of nature,

rooted in the processes that nurture us in life, 

just as plants breathe in and out their photo synthesis

breathing in and breathing out.

Elizabeth Dodson Gray   from Green Paradise Lost  (1979) 

Installation happens this week.

Four boxes of art, one box of rods arrived at the gallery on Friday, September 24.

I can not find the words to name how I am feeling. 

in the middle of the world

It's May.  My authentic self is back.   My exquisite courage.

I cleaned out my quilt cupboard over the weekend.

In the top shelf are the unfinished lamentation quilts, most of which I started during the pandemic.  

In the middle shelf are finished pieces that were going to be in a show that has been postponed.   

The pink one on the bottom is the beautiful doily stardust piece.   

In the bottom shelf are the pieces I've finished for In The Middle of the World.

In the Middle of the World is a two person exhibition that is scheduled to open this coming October at the Mississippi Valley Textile Museum near Ottawa, Canada.  My friend and colleague, Penny Berens, from Nova Scotia and I have been preparing hand stitched artworks for three years for this show.   We are working with a free-lance curator, Miranda Bouchard. 

Penny's work is about her experience of living close to nature.  She observes the small daily changes of growth, decay, seasons, and weather.  She is inspired by the patterns in nature and uses thoughtful, repetitive stitches to communicate what she sees and feels.  Here is an example of her work.

My work is also inspired by nature, especially the colours of early spring and late fall in my northern Ontario environment.  I'm interested in how running our eyes across an open space in nature can set off something deep and unnamable within, and I try to get close to that inner language with my work.

Miranda writes about us.  She listens to us and our work, and writes:  The naturally-dyed, slow-stitched textile works of Judy Martin and Penny Berens inspire ways of seeing, sensing and reflection that are simultaneously outwards, at our surroundings; and inwards, at the landscapes within us.   

The gallery is currently closed because of the pandemic, but we are all hoping that it will open to the public in the fall.  

The images of Manitoulin Island barns and fields are from the drive Ned and I did on Sunday.

I am blessed to have my stitching and my window and a partner during this time of covid.  

My heart goes out to the many, many humans in the world who are really suffering and living in grief and fear.  Each of us is in the middle of the world.