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.   

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.

penny miranda studio visit

resting between night and day (left) resting at low tide (right) both pieces by Penny Berens

Penny Berens (above left) and Miranda Bouchard (right) came to visit on the weekend.    

Penny and I are having a show together in 2021 and Miranda has agreed to be our curator.

The work is still very much in progress.  

We met over the weekend to get a better sense of how it fits together and pinned our pieces up side by side on my pinwall. 

The blue piece in the above photo is Sky with Many Moons (Judy Martin)

We noticed contrasts and similarities in our work. 

My work is generally quite light, both in colour and weight (sometimes only one layer of sheer cloth).  It's usually quite tall.   I like people to look up at my work, as humans all over the world look at the moon.

I used to think of the sky as an invisible protective roof over the earth, my kids, everything.  I'm not sure that I still think like that.  Now I think of it more as magical, even spiritual, filled with star-dust. 
And spheres.

Above is a detail of Penny Berens' beautiful Whispering Cairns.

Penny's work for this show is more earthy.  She is thinking about the beauty of rocks and about the way they hold so much time.  She works with natural dyes too, but is adding more colour to her new work. In the piece in above photo, she says that she is thinking about "all the women who have gone before me in history"

Both Penny and I communicate our powerful love for the earth through the use of natural dyes and repetitive hand stitch / caress.

It's time to think more about caring.
We must care for the earth as lovingly as we take care of our bodies.
Many of us don't think about our bodies, yet still expect them to be ok.

We need to give ourselves self care.
We need to pay more attention.  To the earth and to our bodies.

penny and miranda with judy martin's work in progress

Miranda, our curator, says that she sees many simlarities in Penny and me as persons and artists.  

We both live in rural environments and are mothers and grandmothers.  

Our homes and yards where we each live are similar.

We both feel the presence and influence of a large body of water

We both have a country road, 

Penny lives near Annapolis Royal in Nova Scotia, while I live near Sheguiandah on Manitoulin Island.  Both places are steeped in history.  

We each have a long depth of life experience.  Some differences, but also many similarities. 

I like to think that my work is about reminding people how nature connects us to our interior selves when we stand still and look up and beyond the horizon while Penny's work is closer to what nature looks, smells, and feels like as we move within it, observing.

penny on left, judy on right - both works in progress

Our show will guide viewers through ideas that seem impossible to have at the same time: the swift passage of time that is being held for ages within the trees and rocks, the wounding self-awareness that comes over us when we look at the sky and understand that we are so small, yet immense within, full of past and present and future time.

Miranda told us that at times, to objectively see and speak about our work, she has to disconnect her eyes from her heart.

stone islands  by Penny Berens left, dark side of the sun by judy martin right

That's because there is an emotional power in work made with cloth and thread.
All that touching.  It goes deep.

judy martin,  miranda bouchard, penny berens  May 2019

Judy works from a combination of thought, research and poetry,
Penny observes her environment, says that she goes with the flow.

Both of us are star dust.  We all are.

Thank you to the Ontario Arts Council for funding Miranda in this curatorial project.

meanwhile

 

Dear journal
It's been a week since I last wrote.

I've been working at collecting images to upgrade my website so it has been busy.
This blog rarely posts my finished work.
If I want to share finished work, I need an organized site.

But it is computer work and that gives me a neck ache.

Seeing artwork in real life (irl) is so much better.

All this week I've stayed indoors.
I've started to use the stationary bike again, after a long break from it.

The bike is in my studio so that while I do my pedaling,
I am able to look at what's on the design wall.

Penny and I are having another show together, and we've started planning more seriously.
I've been making brand new work for that, and feel happy. 

 

I'm  also getting to the edges of this sunny-rainy piece. 

It is becoming distorted.
I pull the threads very snugly to encourage the distortion
I stitch around thoe velvet rainy-mushroom shapes three times

 

 

 Not sure if I love it anymore.

 

meanwhile the world goes on
meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscape
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers....
mary oliver 

the images of the sweaters with holes are from the book, Habitus by Ann Hamilton. 

My talk for Halifax

Thank you Nova Scotia for giving Penny and me this beautiful space to show our work.

Penny and I love to stitch and are happiest when we are stitching.
This show reflects our happiness.     

Our work complements each other.  Penny observes the small details that add up to make a big picture, observing, recording, remembering specifics as she documents nature and life's events.

I am concerned about the whirl of it all.
About how time and life go by so fast.

 Not To Know But To Go On is three years big.

 Cloud of Time is one year big.

The three drawings on the wall add up to be six months big.
Time is a material in this work.

American artist Kiki Smith said that art is something that moves from the inside of us into the world.
Art is a way to think, it is a form of communication.

The slowness of the stitched mark gives me thinking time.  As I work with cloth on my lap, I find out from my hands what is in my heart.

The large stitched journal that hangs in the middle of this space  began as a way to slow down and celebrate my turning 60.  I started it on my 59th birthday and ended it on my 61st.

I used up fabrics saved over my lifetime, and every day for three years, I stitched up an entire skein of embroidery floss.   A luxurious amount of thread was used, over 1000 skeins, yet the piece has the simplicity of a Finnish rug.  The colour of thread was chosen without looking, because we don't know, do we, what each day will bring?  Chance is an important element in this piece, as it is in life.

Domestic life, the sheets we fold, the dishes we wash, so much of our lives are spent doing repetitive tasks, most of them every day, in order to accomplish the bigger things.  Those repetitions disappear within the whirl of time.  This piece holds them.

You can't change things.  Change yourself.  Be alone. Take every opportunity to be alone.      Not To Know But To Go On.   Agnes Martin

For more about this exhibition and the opening,
please go to my updates and also to Penny Berens' blog post about the opening.
Thank you to my husband Ned for all the arty photos in this post. xo