In England

Sometimes I have no words. 

image description:  mature woman wearing running shoes and a spiral necklace stands beside a monumental piece of textile art by Sheila Hicks.  

The artwork is entitled Moroccan Prayer Rug.

It was created by Sheila Hicks in 1972 and is five and a half metres high.  It is hand knotted wool.  

Part of the retrospective exhibition at the Hepworth gallery in Wakefield, England.  

Sometimes life is amazing. 

To move slowly alongside

The solitude and quiet emptiness that I find on Manitoulin continues to be very important to my development as an artist.  I intentionally withdraw from people and put a lot of time into my work.  I touch my work a lot as I stitch it.

My pieces are large and simple, which makes it easy for my viewer to enter them.  They are safe, calm places.   I consider them a gift and am generous with the labour I put into my work.

I am planning an installation that uses old wool blankets to make a monumental walk-through corridor.  The rock cuts along the new highway 400 are the inspiration for this new work.  In northern Ontario, large areas of the Canadian Shield have been sliced open by blasting and heavy equipment to reveal eons of time and layers of beautiful sediment and crystals and minerals.

From the speeding car, we are able to look with awe at these magnificent grand pieces of Canada.  Trees grow on top of some of them.  There is something spiritual within these rock cuts.  The car keeps on moving.

My installation of blankets will encourage people to walk slowly alongside at an intimate closeness to the work.   I hope that people will experience the scale and weight of the familiar wool fabric, with their bodies.  Yearning to touch but not touching, and somehow feeling some deep truth of lived emotions that are part of our human experience.

The installation will have two parts, each part made from two or three blankets sewn together and bordered top and bottom with still more blanket cloth.  One part is shown in this post, and it measures 14 feet wide and 10 feet high.  The nick name for this part is Ash and Rose.

Blankets are already full of human time before I work with them.  Generations of time.  The marks of those hands and bodies have left signs of wear and all I have done is add more time and touch with hand stitch.  Both sides.

Materials such as blankets that relate to our universal human experiences in bed where things like birth, death, power or lack of power, pain, comfort, protection, and sex happen, are powerful metaphors.  Making crafted objects from them is contemporary art.

I work with hand stitch and used domestic cloth.
I make hand made things that invite the use of all our senses, especially the sense of touch. 

My view

When we first moved to Manitoulin in 1993, I was astonished by how much the water and sky would change in colour, faster than I could paint it and photographs did not do it justice.  I began to make quick sketches into my journal just to name the colours that nature used to paint with through the seasons.  Over the years, I described this enthralling Eastern view of Manitowaning Bay at least a hundred times with my ball point pen into the pages of my journal, responding to the unpredictable gorgeous colours that changed by the hour.

In direct response to my view of Manitowaning Bay, I have made several large stitched textiles.

This one is an immense lightweight square that responds to the slightest breeze.  Monumental Simplicity was made in 2012 from plant dyed wool gauze and hand stitch 108” x 108”

These photos are from 2012.  We took them at dawn at the top of the ridge near where we live.  The photo above is of me sewing the textile to the cord that would then be propped up with wooden poles.  I look back on that experience with Ned as one of our good moments in a long marriage.

I love this view.  I love looking at it still.

It puts me into a reverie no matter what the colours.

This view of sky, water and that strong horizontal line of the Wikwemikong peninsula that devides them has been a constant in my daily life and as I get older, the more I find myself returning to the simplicity of this natural occurance that I live and breathe with.

beginning with time: day

Another update on the wild pure piece.
I've been stitching diligently and have filled the central area with strips of plant dyed wool stitched with wool threads.

It's so large, I can't get back far enough to photograph it head on.  It covers the entire design wall in my home studio...the photo above was taken from the doorway.  98 inches wide, 85 inches high.

The earthy warm brown of the reclaimed overdyed wool blanket (previously pink) is becoming connected to the central part with rows of seed stitch.  

We've lost our snow.  The day is dark and rainy here.
I'll show the night side of  Beginning With Time in a future post.

silk quilt in progress

Work in progress.  120" square.

only cloth

 

trying to put heart back in

 I've been tweaking my monumentally scaled embroidery. 

It had a red center, but I removed it (see here) and I feel its loss. 
So while we were driving to the airport before our trip, I embroidered wide arcs.

And while we were driving home, I filled in an area to make the central shape rounder.

But still unsatisfied, I undo. 

The piece is 9 feet square.  With a paper pattern, I drew another line, rounder.

Used silk yarn to stitch two neutral arcs.

Just a trace remains of red now.  A rainbow fading in and out.  Maybe now it is perfect.

Getting ready to show this piece again in Oakville, during World of Threads festival.

"I have had a guilt complex about pushing my art, so much so that every time I was about to show it I would have some sort of attack.  ....On the other hand, I destroyed nothing.  I kept every fragment. 
Nowadays, however, I am making an effort to change." 

 Louise Bourgeois, when she was only 68.

The Un Doing

Over the years, in my practice as an artist, I find myself un-doing.
I'll make something beautiful, then cut it up, take stitches out
start again
It’s a real communication with the work

At first, I add
I look, I think
I add another thing. I try to imagine what the piece will look like.
I add another thing

I look ,I think
I re consider



Then I undo

sun rise

Ned and I were up before sunrise to take photographs of Monumental Simplicity at the top of the Ten Mile Point hill. George Wigle let us put the stand up on his property the evening before.

I have to say that this experience was fantastic on so many levels.

I lay down on the grass directly underneath the work to take this.

The top four photos are by Ned. The rest by moi.

NYC journal: Isa Melsheimer and Alice Channer

Vorhang (Ewle) 2012 by Isa Melsheimer. We attended Freize New York and it was very exciting to see so much fine art made with cloth and stitch. This piece by Isa Melsheimer from Germany was almost the first thing I saw at the fair. It reminded me of my own new work with large single layers of fabric and that was so affirmative.

(detail of the embroidery) Online research on this artist shows that she works in a wide variety of media, but large pieces of stitched cloth are very important in her fine art practice. I've selected just a couple of the many installations on her website to share here.

Tiefes Rauschen 2007 by Isa Melsheimer

Vorhang 2008 by Isa Melsheimer. Click here to see more. To see the cloth installations, scroll down until you come to a block of text and then click on FABRIC .

(detail of embroidery)

We were both interested in the work of Alice Channer. These pieces are made from digitally printed spandex fabric stretched over aluminium.

EYES 2012, by Alice Channer.

I became more interested in this young British artist's work when I visited her gallery's website and saw how important large pieces of cloth that drape onto the floor are to her practice. These images are from the installation Out Of Body that showed at South London gallery in 2012.

Cold Metal Body , digital print on heavy crepe de chine with hand carved marble.