road trip back

The photos tell a story

of the beautiful northern Ontario drive

we made last week

to north western Ontario

via the north shore of Lake Superior

with all the rock cuts.

I don't have many photos of the actual destination.  

I didn't think to take photos of the empty fields

behind Burris and Devlin and LaVallee.

We went over to Morson

from Rainy River, past Blackhawk.

Exotic names for the tiny places where people live.  

I didn't think to photograph them. 

Those towns that we drove through or stopped at for soup on the way there and 

also when we were up  there in my home corner of North Western Ontario. 

The Fort Frances area, I tell people.

Besides places named poetically; Terrace Bay, Ignace, Schreiber, Upsala, Emo,

Grassy Narrows, Sleeman, Finland, Nestor Falls, Barwick

there were so many fields and forests that have no name.

That we drove by.  And I did not photograph.

Also, I didn't take enough photos of my children.

They flew to Winnipeg and rented a car to join us.

I do have photos of my brother and I standing in front of 

the trees that my mother planted.

Now giants.

I didn't photograph Ned fixing the gravesite

so that it was perfect.

How can I tell a true story

when most of the photos I have are of long views across big water and cliffs that have 

no relation to the rural pocket of Canada along the rainy river where I grew up.

We drove three full days to get there.

We were there three days.

We drove three more days to get home again.

I worked on Indigo checkerboard during the long drives.  

I stitch in the ditches and also 1/4 inch inside

vast areas of white muslin.

When my father was 22 he was hired to be the secretary of the local school board.  Three applicants interviewed for the one room school in Miscampbell and Pauline Paget age 17 was hired.  In September 1945 they had their first date, a play held at the Burris school.  Theatre continued to be important for them throughout their long marriage.

 

the Ingrid Interview

Q When did you become interested in embroidery - or the textile arts?

A I became aware of world embroidery at age 25 when I was travelling in Great Britain.  I bought perle cotton, embroidery floss and a pattern book in a street market and worked on a linen sample, which I carried in my bike pannier over a period of months.  I also embroidered all the clothing i was wearing on this bike trip.  It was 1974.  I had been quilting since 1970

Q  What background do you bring to your interest?

A  Around the age of ten I learned to embroider by following stamped designs on pillowcases.  I remember loving this activity.  My mother helped me with some of the simple stitches.

When I was twelve I began sewing most of my own clothes.  Throughout high school I made the latest styles for myself such as flowered pants with solid co-ordinated jackets and zip up leather jumpers (made from upholstery fabrics).  I loved the challenge of creating them myself.  I wore these clothes to Expo 67 in Montreal when I was 16.

I also made a lot of Barbie doll clothes at that time for my younger sister's doll and was hired by several mothers to make wardrobes for their daughter's dolls.  These clothes were very imaginative and I used my mother's sewing scraps for them and very tiny buttons and trims that I found in the local Stedman's.  I also had success with my painting in high school and sold oil paintings to the teachers.

Q  How did you source your materials?

A   There were not many fabrics suitable for quilting in 1970 and I used recycled clothing in a variety of weights, as well as an old curtain to stitch my first quilt.  (which is probalby why it did not last).  For embroidery I used embroidery floss from the local five and dime.  When I was pregnant with my first child in 1978 I embroidered several blouses based on Eastern European designs adapted for maternity wear.  I did a lot of smocking and some embroidery for my baby Oona, born 1978.

Q  How did you source your designs?

I adapted sewing patterns and used embroidery designs I found in craft magazines.  I taught myself from diagrams and still have some of those maternity blouses.  I was also knitting and crocheting at the time and had a big collection of knitting magazines.

When Ned and I travelled through Western Europe in 1974 and 1975, a new magazine entitled Craft originated in Great Britain and was available on the Fort Frances newstands.  I asked my mother to collect them for me when we were gone (for over a year) and she did.  I still have those somewhere.

Q  Why did you pursue textile?

A  I think the main reason that I kept coming back to working with textiles is because I could fit it in with my life.  I had a passion for fine art and started painting with intent at the same time that I started having children in the late 70's.  However, embroidery, knitting and quilting could be picked up and put down again more easily and I found them satisfying and a great comfort.

I should also metnion that I began a fine arts degree in visual art in 1976.  I continued to work at this degree for nearly twenty more years, graduating in 1993.  My graduating exhibition was an embroidered quilt and a stitched paper installation in the form of a house.

Judy Martin in 2006 with her self-portrait quilt from 1985  (manitoulin expositor newspaper photo)

Q  How did your decisions impact your work?

A  Some decisions that I made during the 70's that had an impact on my work were:

1.  to have children (eventually we had four by 1987)
2.  to live in rural north-western Ontario (rainy River, thunder Bay, Kenora )   we moved to Manitolin Island in 1993
3.  to take a fine arts degree
4.  to have the ambition to make fine art

But this question is confusing as so many of life's decisions are made for you or happen along the way.  It takes a lot of will to be an artist of any type.

Q  What were your successes and what were your not so good results?

A  The 70's

In 1978 I made a lovely baby quilt for my dear friend Susan.  It was one of the first quilts I made.   It had a rocking horse appliqued and embroidered in the centre of a mass of triangles.  The colour scheme was red and white.   I made several more baby quilts during this time for my own children and also for my friends who were all having babies.

The 80's - I designed my first original quilt in 1982 and was really excited about it.  It was called Sleeping Giant and was an abstracted interpretation of a local landmark.  I remember being very excited to have such control over the arrangement of the geometric pieces and have them tell a narrative.  It was a break through. Before that I had made traditional quilts such as Bear's Pa,w, Dresden plate, Crown of Thorsns.

Another breakthrough came when I began dyeing my own cloth.  I started this after we moved to Kenora in the early 80's.

Another break throughs came in the 80's.  I stitched magazine papers into traditonal quilt designs and also family photographs which I arranged with seasonal fabrics.  I also began to use more and more embroidery in my quilts, and my piece entitled In the Centre of the Body is the Soul was made in 1996.  Every square in the central medallion is covered with dense chain stitch embroidery.

Q  What else can you tell me about your journey?

A  I spend time in the Textile Museum of Canada whenever I go to Toronto and over the years have been very much influenced by the world textiles on view there.  One year I saw large Indian embroideries that changed my life.  Covered with yellow, red, green and blue chain stitch, these hangings had such power and I felt such resonance when looking at them, that I knew I had to follow thorugh with this much hand stitch in my own work.  I've since taught myself some of the unique stitches used in Indian embroidery and have also studied African and Japanese dyed and stitched textiles.

A  Do you have images to help tell your story?

Q  Yes.  Lots.

..........................................................................................................................................................

This interview happened ten years ago (2007).  I came across it when cleaning out a drawer.  I do not remember who Ingrid was - I think she may have been a student from a college in Sudbury who chose me as a subect for a project.  If you are reading my blog, Ingrid - please let me know either through a comment or email.

As I go through my shelves and boxes and come across the items mentioned in this post, such as the clothes I embroidered in Europe and the blouses I embroidered when expecting babies - I will post them.  I have saved some Barbie Doll clothes too -

This is the first post that I have ever done that has no images.

Judy Martin in 2007 with daughter Grace (Manitoulin Expositor photo)

my early life

the images of my youth in this post have a freshness for me that my newer ideas can never have

my mother made her own clothes from vogue patterns

my sister is 5 years younger than me, my brother 20 months older

my father designed and built our house on the highway

I grew up on acerage in north western ontario, Canada

 In art you need two things

a)  a feeling of groundedness
b)  a place of risk where you are not quite sure what will happen

a vulnerable space
fragile

 I repeat myself all the time

what is our interior landscape?

why not pay more attention to the fragility of our own life?

pauses

stillness

the mark - and also the space around the mark

our son Jay scanned my father's slides 

Sunday quilt photo

I am doing a lot of stitching these days.
I start early in the morning and continue through the day, into the evening.
I have an exhibition in Toronto in October and have designed 8 new pieces, none of them small.

Several of them are white
Four are made with old linen domestic damask..
I think that the title of the exhibition will have the word cloud in it.
I am still inspired by Luce Irigarary's poem 

especially the line "how do I make earth out of air, and protect the cloud in me?"

I am a bit worried that this blog will be boring as I work on these same 8 quilts over the summer.
I hesitate to show them here actually.
Isn't there a rule somewhere that artists must keep the work secret until the big unveil at the opening?
But then what would I show in my blog?
Rule, shmule.

This post is the first of Sunday quilt photos showing the progress of this body of work.
It also will document the advance of spring and summer here in my yard.
Today it's the middle of May and the new green all over is really fresh.

It's mother's day.
I share this lovely portrait of my mother Pauline in her mid-30's.

Mother's day was her very favourite holiday.
She didn't allow us to celebrate her birthday.

It is also my father's birthday today.   He turns 94.
He's been alone for ten years now.

These new quilts are journals of my spring of great happiness.
I feel as if I have a cloud of love in me.  

My mother, my self

This year I am reflecting on my  life and on my body of work.   Finding a voice that reflects who I am has taken several decades yet my starting point remains my response to personal relationships and to the passage of time. Much of my work reflects on my experience of a childhood in rural north western Ontario, Canada.

I made this quilt 30 years ago in 1985 as a way to help me understand my mother and it did help. Now as I reflect, I realize that my mother was only 59 when I made this quilt, (I was 34). I suppose that my daughters don't understand me either, but as I age, I am beginning to understand my mother.

Visit body of work at the top of this blog for more info about this quilt.

a simple poem for Virginia Woolf

This started out as a simple poem

for Virginia Woolf you know the kind

we women writers write these days

in our own rooms

in our own time

a salute a gesture of friendship

a psychological debt

paid off

I wanted it simple

and perfect round

hard as an

egg I thought

only once I'd said egg

I thought of the smell

of bacon grease and dirty frying pans

and whether there were enough for breakfast

I couldn't help it

I wanted the poem to be carefree and easy

like children playing in the snow

I didn't mean to mention

the price of snowsuits or

how even on the most expensive ones

the zippers always snag

just when you're late for work

and trying to get the children

off to school on time

a straightforward poem

for Virginia Woolf that's all

I wanted really

not something tangled in

domestic life the way

Jane Austen's novels tangled

with her knitting her embroidery

whatever it was she hid them under

I didn't mean to go into all that

didn't intend to get confessional

and tell you how

every time I read a good poem

by a woman writer I'm always peeking

behind it trying to see

if she's still married

or has a lover at least

wanted to know what she did

with her kids while she wrote it

or whether she had any

and if she didn't if she'd chosen

not to or if she did did she

choose and why I didn't mean

to bother with that

And I certainly wasn't going

to tell you about the time

my best friend was sick in intensive care

and I went down to see her

but they wouldn't let me in

because I wasn't her husband

or her father her mother

I wasn't family

I was just her friend

and the friendship of women

wasn't mentioned in hospital policy

or how I went out and kicked

a dent in the fender of my car

and sat there crying because

if she died I wouldn't be able

to tell her how much I loved her

(though she didn't and we laugh

about it now) but that's what got me

started I suppose wanting to write

a gesture of friendship

for a woman for a woman writer

for Virginia Woolf

and thinking I could do it

easily separating the words

from the lives they come from

that's what a good poem should do

after all and I wasn't going to make excuses

for being a woman blaming years of silence

for leaving us

so much to say

This started out as a simple poem

for Virginia Woolf

it wasn't going to mention history

or choices or women's lives

the complexities of women's friendships

or the countless gritty details

of an ordinary woman's life

that never appear in poems at all

yet even as I write these words

those ordinary details intervene

between the poem I meant to write

and this one where the delicate faces

of my children faces of friends

of women I have never even seen

glow on the blank pages

and deeper than any silence

press around me

waiting their turn

Poem by Kingston Ontario poet Bronwen Wallace  (1945-1989)
Paintings of the island she looked at in Lake of the Woods near Morson Northwestern Ontario by Pauline Johnson (1927-2007) (my mother)

binding time and place in experience

I will always connect the upper half of this white circle with the winter I'm spending with my father.

  January in the apartment.  February in the hospital.

My hands make small gestures and pull the threads tight around the many holes.
This eyelet semi circle is the last large part of the final panel of the four meditation panels I am making with my home community.  I am so glad to have had this work to do.

And walking.
I am so glad to be able to walk

Walking every day.  Walking there in the morning and then back to his home again early evening.

Step by step by step. Stitching the place and the weather to myself.
I recall walking in this town six years ago.
In fact it's the walking I remember when I think of that time when she was ill and dying.
I stitched beside her too.

"Where's your stitching?" she would ask me, until I brought it out
and my moving hands soothed both of us.

thinking too much again

I have been able to go to my studio these past few days and fool around.  I say fool around because I really do not have time to play. 

The Manitoulin Circle Project has been given an exhibition in a public art gallery in  September and the fourth panel is still not in the frame.   Although I do not have time to flounder around, I need to.  

The dress embroidery in these images was done as part of my degree in 2009.  Doing it led to a self discovery.  When it was nearly finished I realized that I had pictured the dress on a hanger... waiting to be worn.  Did that mean that I was waiting to be an artist?  

In December 2012 I added more cloth to the small embroidery.
I thought it might be a good quilt BACK.  

Is it harder for women? 

  How do we manage it?  How do we balance our lives and our creative work?

Now I've removed those fabrics and thought some more.  Looking and thinking.

Did I mention that the art gallery has offered a publication about the work? 

My mother told me to think.       She'd holler it.  THINK!

As if thinking helps. 

(It doesn't.) 

"I thought of my three daughters and my mother in law and my own dead mother....not one of us was going to get what we wanted.  We're so transparently in need of shoring up our own pronouns....her...  she.  We ask ourselves questions endlessly, but not nearly sternly enough....we are too kind, too willing, too unwilling too, reaching out blindly with a grasping hand, but not knowing how to ask for what we don't even know we want."    Carol Sheilds    

(the last sentence from A Scarf, a short story she wrote age 65)