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.
