rock cut on the lawn

rock cut side one, a two part sculpture to be hung from the ceiling,
rescued wool blankets and hand stitched wool yarn,
 each part 8 or 9 feet high and 13 feet wide, 
still in progress after 4 years of steady work by Judy Martin 

Two things:  repetition and simplicity.

rock cut part one, side one  French knots made with wool yarn on wool blanket

I use the same stitch.   Over and over.

Also obsession.

I get absolutely lost.  I enter a kind of dream world while my hands keep moving.

rock cut part two, side two, reverse of couching stitch, wool yarn on mended wool blanket

It's too much to understand, the hours and hours of time that are in the work.  

rock cut side two, a two-sided two part suspended sculpture,
rescued wool blanket, plant dyed wools, hand stitched 
each part 8 or 9 feet high,  13 feet wide,
looking puny on the lawn
but it is a big piece by Judy Martin, begun in 2015

Two sides.  That's because I want the viewer to move around the work so that the body is engaged, not just the eyes and mind.     

Because we know with our bodies.                   

Louise Bourgeois visited me

Louise Bourgeois kept an extraordinary body of notes and diaries that interweave with her artwork.

Her diary embodied her relationship with the unknown
"like a lake that one knows but very little"  LB

"I am passionately going somewhere, but I'm not sure where"  LB

She focuses on the concept of reparation.

She repaired antique tapestries in her youth.
As an adult, she needed to repair her inner world.

The process of reparation entails finding internal 'parents' to contain and detoxify the anxiety she was feeling, and return it to the inner child in a way that it could be understood and thought about.

This "container/contained" is Louise's artwork.

She said that art is a guaranty of sanity many times.  See here, here, and here for examples.

Art is a guaranty of sanity "not because troubles are cast away,
but because we learn to stand more" she wrote in her journal.

"Pins are weapons" Louise said, "but needles are tools of reparation".

Images in this post are of a worn out whole cloth quilt (white cotton with blue thread)
that has been repaired.  I'm not sure if it's finished but I am folding it up for a while.

The text is from an essay I read the other day about Louise Bourgeois in this book.

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.

the aesthetic of craftsmanship

meticulous workmanship
utter concentration

traditional techniques
embraced

 transcended

learning the skill takes time
making the object takes time

 don't look for a short cut

the flow of work is what is important
not how many hours it takes

 bring all of yourself to what you do

simplicity is arrived at through complexity

soft

 I wanted my quilt, Soft Summer Gone, to have a kind of timelessness, as if it has always been.

 I made it large and simple and open with emptiness.

 

 I coloured it with yellow golden-rod wildflowers gathered at the end of summer from the fields and ditches.

  I stitched it with large gestures that reached and crossed and with small circles that rose up.

 I wanted my viewer to yearn to touch the stitches and the soft cloth.

I hoped to cause a poetic experience deep within.

Quilt National sent our work back to us last week.
I unfolded her softly.  

lumpy-bumpy research

This week I continue to stitch into this layered cloth, adding the weight and tension of jeans-top-stitching thread on top of what is already stitched.
An entire spool in 4 days.
The thread twists on itself and often knots up, one long thread taking nearly an hour to lay in.

My nick name for this piece is sunny-rainy.
The rainy part because of the soft rain-drop shapes of velvet in the darker border.

This week after seeing it on the wall, the name has lengthened to
"sunny-rainy-lumpy-bumpy"
I still love you Sunny!
Even though you want to stay in my lap way past the time you should be independent.

So this post is about my research into dimensional wall presentations  (a Regina Benson term)

The work from the artists I have curated here is interesting, beautiful and very alive.
Whatever imperfections in the work have been embraced.
Whatever distortions that happened during their creation, are shown off.

KYUNG AE WANG     her archetypes from 2008

NUI PROJECT      Atushi Yoshimoto

NUI PROJECT       Keisuke Nomaguchi

NUI PROJECT        Tsutomu Maeno

MAGDALENA ABAKANOWICZ          Yellow Abakan

MAGDELENA ABAKANOWICZ    Red Abakan and Black Environment

EL ANATSUI

the piece is more thread than cloth now
and my wrists ache

"I wondered why I was insisting on negating some of the characteristics of my fibreworks, when their living materiality was what had drawn me to the medium"  Regina Benson