Fare Well

Today is the last day of 2020 and I am thinking about endings.                                                         About things feeling finished.     About turning the page.

Above is  Underfoot The Earth Divine, one of the few pieces I finished during the pandemic.

The first image in this post is the reverse side of the piece, and it high lights the lovely wool thread drawing that happened spontaneously.   

The second image shows the front, pieced from rescued damask table linens.  You can see where I cut holes into the piecework in the lower half, and then repaired them with velvet.  

Good bye 2020.  

We've had many challenges this year.  

We've learned a lot about our selves.  We've learned that we can rely on our own selves.                 We've learned that we are strong and we are beautiful.  We've learned that we will figure it out.

I spoke about these ideas of inner strength and softness in the lecture I gave in Toronto last October.  The lecture shares about where I live and about the creation of my work.  It details the spring and summer of 2020 and shows how my work helps me to carry on through emotional turmoil. I learn to trust myself through the step by step making of each piece.   

The lecture shows how I've learned how to let things rest when I don't know quite what to do next.  

And that mending and correcting errors  are essential because the journey of broken-ness is part of each piece and also part of me as a human.

The lecture seems a little slow at the beginning, but I encourage you to visit it when you have a quiet 45 minutes.  I hope that you can find the time for a visit with me, my dear friends.  Here's the link.

Thank you very much for being with me through 2020.  I felt your support.  Love You!   

New Work

Island Heart 2020 by Judy Martin,
rayon, silk, rust, harvested local plant-dyes, a few commercial fabrics including my late father's hospital gown
 80" h x 73" w, embroidered with wool yarns and hand quilted with cotton threads 

I took photographs of finished new work last week.
Looking at my work through photographing it gives give me a distance from it.
I'm able to see my own work more clearly.

I am a woman and am often interupted.
This means that my work develops deeply, with many layers, over a period of months.
Because I usually have many pieces underway,
I just put them away in drawers or shelves for breaks of three to four months
and they steep.

As time whirls past,
my life experiences alter how I see those pieces in the drawers,
so that when I bring them out to work on again,
I see them more clearly and am ready to move forward.
However, very often, my work and I move need to move backwards.
Things need to be un-picked so that my work and I can start up again on a different path.

Flowers Started Blooming Inside Me  2020, Judy Martin 
rescued wool blanket saddened with iron, holes cut into it, autobiographical artwork and velvet appliqued onto it,
 hand stitched with wool threads   67"h x 26" w (when folded in....62" wide when full width)

It was through photographing it that I was inspired to make a cocoon shape out of the blanket piece.

Flowers Started Blooming Inside Me went through so many stages, all very intense and quite personal. 

I cut the holes to make it vulnerable because women are full of holes and are so open.
I added the spirals and the horizontal stitching after so it would be stronger.

Those red spirals.
They seem like flowers.
And as I worked on the piece, I began to feel loved.
Was it the work that did this?

" I wish my work to have the lightness and joyousness of a springtime which never lets anyone suspect the labours it has cost"   Henri Matisse

Touching The Stars 2020, Judy Martin 
silk velvet, harvested local plant dyes, appliqued to commercially embroidered linen base, then folded.  51" h x 21" w   

I finished the velvet piece late at night, pinned it to the wall rather carelessly and went to bed.
I woke early with this piece on my mind and when I saw it again I realized that it was a self portrait.
It's me.
It's how I feel about my body when I do not have a mirror.
I feel soft.

Touching the Stars
Like my other new work, the materials led me.
This one is velvet, with unexpected rich surprises of colour from local plants.
Velvet responds so well to dye process.
It's so lush and soft.
I kept stitching it and touching it.
It was the touching of it that made me want to tuck it in towards itself.
This made it even more loveable.

My work makes use of the things that only thread and cloth can do.

Prayer to the Sky  2019  Judy Martin
three layers of wool, (madder interior layer, indigo exterior layer), tucked, embroidered and hand quilted,
cut to reveal the inner layer, 60" h x 64.5" w 

The indigo horizon piece was unpicked a lot.
The barely there marks are like chanting.

Perhaps it too is about female interior yearning and fragility and openness and sadness.

These new pieces are the sexiest I have ever made.

Cloth becomes charged with touch.

We rub and cut and pierce and poke and touch.  

Eventually it feels as if the cloth touches us back.

(an Abbas Akhavan idea)

This is my work.

in the middle of my story

I am an artist.

I live on a large island in Lake Huron.

I have lived here for 26 years with my husband.

Before that, I lived in North Western Ontario for 40 years.

My cities were Winnipeg and Thunder Bay, half day car drives away. 

I dream all the time.

I have made art my whole life.  

While raising my family of four kids, I taught classical piano and continued my art.

I constantly study art.

I obtained two fine art honours BA degrees through distance education. 

 In December 2018 I received the Craft Ontario award for mid-career excellence.

The name of the award (mid-career ) is inspiring.

Does that mean that although I am in my mid-60’s and have pursued art my whole life that I am merely in the middle of my artistic career?   Yay.

Mid-Career - those words make me want to go closer to the edge. 

Those words make me want to go deeper into myself.

I want to go somewhere on my art path that I have not been before, and that I do not know.

I want to be brave in this journey.   I want to take more risks.

The Expectations

 Expectations 1

 Expectations 2

 Expectations Christmas

The girls and I discussed our hopes and dreams last night.

How would I feel if I let expectations about my self go?

If I didn't expect myself to do so much stitching?
If I didn't expect myself to be vulnerable?

the sun, the moon, and also the stars

moon, wool thread, wool felt 2018  Judy Martin

sun  wool thread, wool felt, acrylic paint ( in progress)  judy martin 

and also the stars  wool thread, wool felt, 2018 judy martin

 

Intuition and conceptual thought are married in most of my work.
And some of the time they live happily ever after.

But there is usually some tension along the way.

I need to make my work as true as I can.
Believable.

Real

I rely on the archetypal shapes of circle, cross and dot and use them as language.

The works in this post are the under-sides of pieces made last winter  (see here)

They are the backs I suppose.
Felt drawings
I plan to display them so that the original 'first side' will not be shown.

I don't mind that the original designs will be secret.
Believe me.

I took them outside and laid them in the garden, amongst the caterpillars
and forget me nots.

from left to right:  sun (february)  and also the stars (march and april)  moon (january)  2018

These three pieces document each day of January, February, March and half of April 2018.
I used velvet and found fabrics to make small collages on wool felt

which were then attached together.

I kept going until I ran out of felt.

Then I turned them over, and used the felt 'backs' as if they were pieces of paper
and made completely fresh and new drawings.

Drawings that don't have anything to do with the winter.

These new drawings will have their first showing in Halifax Nova Scotia this summer.
Penny Berens and I have produced an exhibition entitled Cloth Of Time.

the underside of the leaf

cool in shadow

sublimely unemphatic

smiling of innocence

Agnes Martin

prayer flag for Canada

 I finished this today

 in time for International Women's Day

 for Canada

a prayer for women,
for our grand daughters

the old hankies were embroidered with circles and edged with red thread, and then buttonholed to a linen backing cloth

 the backing cloth was then removed, revealing the inner - ness

 I washed it and hung it on the line

then I blocked it by pinning it to the wall
stretching and smoothing with my hands instead of ironing

and noticed that some of the threads were bleeding.

that's ok