little gatherings

 

How does making help us develop thinking?

How does re-making help us develop re-thinking?

These little bundles started out over 3 years ago.  See here.

Each contains four hemlock twigs.  There are more of them than I thought.  That's nice.

Each bundle is wrapped five times.  

dyed cloth

embroidery threads

wool yarn

cheesecloth

red cotton thread 

They seem to have reached a resting place. 

Maybe they are finished.

Maybe they will continue to evolve.

Like me.

Lucky Protection

 Lucky Protection, muslin and cotton, reverse applique, hand quilted, 2011, 39" x 42"

 Lucky Protection, reverse side, hand embroidery

Oona brought Jack's baby quilt home when the family was here for Christmas so that I could borrow it for my exhibition at Artists on Elgin next week.  click here for information
I finished it in 2011.  All the other pieces have been made since - most during the last few months. I'll show some of them over the next few weeks.

Protection

protection study, wool yarn knitted and felted with metal buttons


Grace is moving to England on Monday. She wanted to learn how to make a Christmas turkey, so that was today's project. It's been great to have her home as this past week.

She came to the circle project with me yesterday.

self: blue robe

I spent most of last spring and early summer stitching this piece. Even though it had a million hours in it, it was not visually successful. Yesterday I brought the back to the front by rolling it onto itself and voila, the protective red thread frame sets off the isolated domestic image. I think it looks better now.

The front used to look like this, the back like this. It's so difficult to exhibit two sided pieces.

I'm putting it into the Greenwood Quiltery and Gallery exhibition that starts April 15 in Guelph, Ontario.

Never give up.

juxtapose

framed by intellect grounded in emotion a haunting quality a knowing anxiety voice of reason voice of madness

Piles of my work are all over the house. I picked stuff from the framer for the two exhibitions in April and placed everything next to each other. I've included works still in progress in the mix and the juxtapositions delight me.

listen to your body

Too much this past week.

This is me, curled up under
'protection
blanket'.

magic

This embroidery was started two years ago and then left to simmer in a drawer. It has been very nurturing to work on it again, 'like a mother's arms'.

These days I'm also very slowly reading Jeanette Winterson - a few pages each day. I get stopped by the wonderful imagery she is able to bring up in my imagination. Here's another passage from her Oranges are not novel:

Magic was very important.
The chalk circle you drew around yourself to protect yourself from elementals and the like.
It's gone out of fashion now, which is a shame.
Of course people will laugh at you, but people laugh at a great many things, so there's no need to take it personally.
Why will it work?
It works because the principle of personal space is always the same. It's a force field around yourself, and as long as our imagining powers are weak, it's useful to have something physical to remind us.

Studio time?

I spent most of the day preparing this piece for shipping to the Netherlands. My friend Marjan purchased it when she and her husband were in Canada last year. The idea was that we could bring it with us when we go to vist them next week. However, the piece is large and awkward to carry and so today I shipped it. It made me think about today's Robert Genn letter. He wrote about the low income of Canadian artists and that the more educated artists are, the less paintings they sell. He also commented on the fact that the average amount of studio time artists put in is only twenty six hours a week. He thinks it should be sixty. (p.s. That's ten hours a day for six days a week) A key to the lousy fiscal performance of artists could be the low number of hours they apparently spend alone in the studio. A twenty-six-hour week is not enough. Forty is more like it. Sixty is better because you can start to get good at sixty. Show me artists who have put in ten thousand hours and I'll show you a chicken in every pot. Robert Genn

My last two days have been spent doing income tax and preparing two paintings for shipping. Is that studio time? I think not.

Delivered

protection tunic 2006 Delivered this.
protection dress 2006 Picked this one up.

We made another road trip to Sudbury today to exchange my work for the Local Colour portfolio. Living in the North increases the time that the business side of my so-called career takes. I'm starting to question myself again. It's nice that Ned supports me by doing the driving. I can stitch.

quilts are art

Now that we use duvets to cover our beds instead of wool blankets and quilts - can we finally say that quilts are art? I don't necessarily agree with the following quote, but came across it this morning and was provoked.

“Only the useless is truly beautiful. Everything useful is ugly since it is the expression of a need, and a man’s needs are, like his pitiful, infirm nature, ignoble and disgusting. The most useful place in the house is the latrine.”
1835 – Theopile Gautier

The Roof Project

stainless steel screening, polyester sheer, metallic thread
I've spent the last couple of months considering the shiny metal oblong of a barn roof. What does a barn roof do? It shelters animals from wet, cold, wind and keeps hay and seeds safe and dry. Like everyone else, I am concerned about the way that humans have changed the earth’s environment for the worse. I am a mother of four grown children who have been recently launched into this precarious world. If I could make an invisible roof to cover and protect my children wherever they may fly, I would. Wouldn’t any mother? But they must take their own risks, and for the good of us all, they must decide on their own future. plastic slide sleeves, maple keys, lupine pods and seeds, pussy willows, variety of threads
I began to make roof samples and found that one would lead to the next. I found the process of working through ideas and handling a wide variety of materials opened me up. It was difficult to stop thinking of new projects. Wool felt, copper and aluminium metal, white shiny cloth like satin and taffeta, blue sky, bird imagery, safety pins, vertical oblongs, cross-stitch, stainless steel screen, seeds, quilts, rolls of hay, on and on. These are some of the materials and imagery that have fed the roof project.

another deadline

Overseas Opus students have an extra month to get their act together and that's such a relief for a busy gal like moi. I'm following through on a single idea to the nth degree - and coming up with a zillion samples and also a proposal. I've choosen an extended metal barn roof as my inspiration because it's so beautiful and nurturing.

Horse Barn on Townline Road

The sight of this barn roof has been a long time inspiration. Solvent transfer on fine linen. Metaphorically, isn't a roof like a quilt? They both protect. Sheet aluminum, engraved.

Canadian Craft Federation

I am pleased by J Penney Burton's interpretation of my work in her article for the Canadian Crafts Federation. She says: "The wall quilts of Judy Martin demonstrate many surface design techniques. In Moisture and Greenness, she combines many quilting patterns to form a cohesive yet non-traditional whole. This work could be seen as an environmental call to arms, referencing windmills, alternative sources of power, extreme weather, and the potential water crisis. These elements exude the peace and fragility of the earth, all shown under cover of the night sky." You can read her entire article about Canadian Textile artists or a wider variety of articles on the 2007 year of craft on the CCF website.

Protection Blanket

This quilt is the one that we are presently hanging in our home. The central diamond is embellished with sequins.

Light – reflecting materials such as mirrors, beads, sequins, and white shells are associated with protection as they are thought to have the ability to ward off evil and thereby preserve fertility in many cultures world wide.

Protection Blanket is number 42 on my list of one hundred quilts.

Most precious

my children

The Power of Red

Red is the most powerful
the most vibrant
the most exhilarating of colours.
Red represents the blood of life, the blood of death.
Red fabrics have been used as protection in many parts of the world.
One way was to applique red fabric to the vulnerable areas of dress such as over the seams or around the neck. Red material used in this way should be more expensive than that of the garment.

from Embroidered Textiles by Sheila Paine

The Manitoulin Expositor

I've added a link on my sidebar to the local paper that comes out every Wednesday here on Manitoulin Island. The publisher is Rick McCutcheon, and the current editor is Jim Moodie . The Manitoulin Expositor has won many awards over the years for its coverage of local events in a thorough and sometimes provocative manner. On Saturday, Rick himself interviewed me for the paper about my work and I appreciate the thoughtfulness of the completed article. Since it's not one of the ones on the website I'll quote some of it here. Thanks so much MrMcCutcheon. Both for this specific article and also for your many years of community involvement here on Manitoulin Island.

Two new innovative works by Manitoulin artist Judy Martin give an Island flavour to the 50th annual Northern Ontario Art Association (NOAA) travelling exhibit that began its local presentation last Saturday at the Sheguiandah Centennial Museum. Visitors to the Sheguiandah museum will observe a change in Ms Martin's style and technique, if not her theme. People who have come to know her as an artist who works in textiles and paints in watercolours and acrylics, may be surprised tosee the etched wax techniques she utilized in both of the works selected. The two pieces share a common nurturing theme: protection. Anyone who has seen displays of her work in textiles, in particular her quilts, will recall that this concept is important to the artist.

"I'm inspired right now by textiles from both Africa and India. The patterns have very meaningful and symbolic imagery. You can learn so much about person in these societies from their dress: their social status, whether they're married or whether they're widowed." Ms Martin went on to observe that the tunic, which would cover the torso, "is meaningful as the tunic covers people's most vulnerable parts: their heart and internal organs."

The other related piece in the exhibition is titled "protection apron" and in this case she has used the symbolically protective red fabric in an applique technique. This is a representation of an apron meant to tie around the wearer's waist, and the red fabric addition, she says, "covers a woman's most vulnerable part: her womb."

Ms Martin mused about the subject and style of her two protection pieces. "I'm used to working symbolically; My quilts are about protection."

It's a clear theme running through Ms Martin's work in a variety of mediums that she has an urgent need to show the woman /mother /female in her archetypal form as nurturer and protector. But she who would protect must herself be protected of course, and these two talismanic pieces of Ms Martin's new work nicely demonstrate this aspect of one of humanity's equations.

Feedback re: Cambridge exhibition

Curator Ivan Jurakic gave me the following feedback about the Protection Blankets exhibition now up at the Preston location of the Cambridge gallery.

The exhibition has been very well received according to the feedback i get from staff. People are really responding to the work and i've seen people spending a long time in the gallery with the work during my visits. I haven't had a chance to look at the guest book, but i placed
it in the gallery for the Waterloo Quilt Festival so i hope you received lots of positive feedback.

This show of seven recent quilts will be up for another two weeks. (until JUNE 23)

50th annual NOAA exhibition

We just returned from the opening of the 50th annual NOAA exhibition that is being hosted by our local museum. This is a juried exhibition that begins each fall with new work and then tours North Eastern Ontario. Protection Apron won one of the awards.