a lived life

Above, acrylic of daughter April by her older sister Grace - they were both in high school at the time.

This post is about a corner of my upstairs home studio that has been important to my process for quite a while - at least 10 years.

It's an additive collage of family photographs that have come into my possession over time.  I've pinned the photos to the wall as I've received them.  They tell my story to me.

The top photo in the above group was in my father's bedroom in Kingston - he had printed it himself on one of his large digital printers.  All of us are there - Jay, April, me, Grace, Oona and Ned - That photo is at least a dozen years old.

The post card above left is from Newgrange in Ireland, the embroidery below is something I removed from one of my pieces, the portrait is a photo Ned took because we needed one of me stitching...can't remember exactly why.  It's from 2009.

Photos of my siblings, my parents, Ned's parents and several of each child are up on this wall.  In the upper left photo is our oldest grandchild Everett with his dad and mom..he's 2 in the photo....now he's 8.

Here is Jack, crawling across his Alaskan kitchen door threshold from the deck.  8 months in the photo, he's five years now.

 above, the newest grandchild, Aili - very precious.

Things I've read go up on this wall.  That photo is of me  age 50.

Now I have to take this life collage down because Ned has been doing some repairs and the wall needs to be painted.  Thought I'd document it first.

art can connect us to something that is lost

take my heart like a hand and its fingers, Judith e Martin stitched collage (detail), 2005

At times, I wonder what is worth posting about on this blog. 

What am I comfortable with showing?

My work is so large and slow that it seems to stand still when I post about the progress I make with it, day by day.  

And anyway, the blog is not my art.

This blog is just a journal.
It actually takes time away from my art.
Why then, do I carry on with it?

Newfoundland's northern tip, September 2014

I want my art to communicate who I am.

I also want my art to help my viewer access something unnameable within themselves.    

Artist Ann Hamilton believes that "art can connect us to something that is lost."   

By this, I think she means those ideas, dreams, and loved ones that we carry around inside us.

Maybe the blog writing helps me to connect with you in that way. 
Maybe it is my art.

Gaston Bachelard and me

“Immensity is within ourselves. It is attached to a sort of expansion of being that life curbs and caution arrests, but which starts again when we are alone.” Gaston Bachelard from The Poetics of Space

Trunk Show #3: Calendar

February family photos, lace, wool, corduroy, acrylic paint, ribbon, buttons. about 27" square 1988-89June family photos, dyed cotton organdy, thread, about 25" square 1988-89 September family photos, pages from nursery rhyme books, cotton, thread, about 32" square 1988-89 December family photos, christmas cards, wool, taffeta, pine cones, embroidery thread, beads, about 28" x 26" 1988-89

Calendar Series

For one year, just after our youngest was born, I had doubles made of all the photographs I took of our kids just being themselves. Then I made a wall piece for each month using those doubles as a starting point. I used seasonally appropriate fabrics for each month. June is a single layer of dyed organdy, light as air, blue as a summer sky.
These are drugstore processed snapshots. Not digital images, not photo transfers.
Oona was 10. Above she is shown with Grace, age 3. (detail of December) Jay was 8. (detail of September) Grace (detail of February April was only one year old then. (detail of June)

Motherhood consumed me throughout the 80’s and 90’s. In 1983 we had moved from Thunder Bay where Ned and I had a Finnish farm to the paper mill town of Kenora in NorthWestern Ontario. The older two children were born in Thunder Bay, the younger two in Kenora.

There are twelve of these, one for each month but I only took these four to the September trunk show in Toronto. It's interesting to me, that even then, I was obsessed with documenting the swift passage of time. It's especially evident with young children - they grow up so very fast.

Too many photos, too little time

collage of digital photos of a single drawing done in August 2008

This photo is from my "july 2008 and onwards" file in "judy's pictures". I have just spent half an hour looking (for a different photo). Could not find it, but felt I had to post something. Yes, digital cameras are wonderful and it's great to be able to take so many photos so cheaply and have them at one's fingertips in the computer, but who has time to sort them?

I did this collage after researching Muybridge two years ago.

cut-ups

I had to make photo collages of my exhibition idea for the degree work I'm doing in the UK. I procrastinated forever, but it was a valuable exercise. The best one was of the Halcrow house from the front with ten blue quilts flapping. To get the quilts to the correct scale for the house, I cut up 4" x 6" photos of my indigo fabrics that I'd pinned in arrangements. Put things sideways. Cropped things drastically. Now I see new quilt designs. Simple and minimalist. photo collage across two pieces of 18 x 24 drawing paper

imagine this

Imagine my indigo quilts billowing on a clothes line near the Halcrow house.