Box Two for In The Middle of the World

I've loved the rock cuts of northern Ontario my whole life.

Now I'm sending textiles that are inspired by them to our exhibition next month.  

Penny Berens from Nova Scotia and I are working with a young freelance curator, Miranda Bouchard.  

Miranda supports us.  

She reminds us to create our true work.  

My work is grounded in phenomenology and the huge inner world. 

For me, phenomenology is the idea that just through living,

just through moving our bodies through time and space,

just through breathing and touching and hearing and tasting and seeing,

we learn.  

Our bodies retain knowledge.

Our bodies never forget. 

Penny and I have been told that we make drawings with stitch, 

but drawing occupies a single plane, 

embroidery also marks the reverse side. 

The rugged beauty of northern Ontario is held in my work.  

The quiet.  The strength.

The birdsongs.  The wind.

The Norah Rosamond Hughes gallery is a large heritage site within the MVTM museum.

The walls are thick, rough and natural.  There will be a lot to experience.    

There will be a lot of movement required.  

Moving releases people from the rational mind, into a creative trance.

A place of insight. 

No matter what comes along, we are always standing in the middle of a sacred space.  

Everything that comes into our circle has come to teach us what we need to know.  

                                                                                                    Pema Chodron

link for artist talk on September 29 is here

Box One

I live on a sweet island.  

It is quiet here, just birdsong and wind in the trees.

The kinds of moments in nature that happen quickly and then are gone.

We remember them in our bodies.

I watch the lake every day.

The colours of the sky and the water change all the time. 

There are things in nature that we are unconsciously aware of.

The interconnectedness between the land, the air, and humanity is one of these.

I use all the senses in my work.

Smell, sound, touch, taste, sight and also the sixth sense - mystery.

Art is like nature.  It opens the inner world.

My work reflects the quietness of nature.

I work alone for long hours laying in repetitive marks inspired by nature's way.

I make large scale, hand stitched drawings and sculptures based on simple repetition.

I use domestic textiles and natural dye.  

I have been exhibiting my work for 40 years. 

The aesthetics of simplicity, time, labour and repetition ground my work.  

My completed works reflect who I am.  My work is me.

This is why I use dyes from my locale.  

This is why I use family textiles.

This is why I use large space. 

My language is the stitched mark.

I keep paring away anything else.

I've created a body of work using wool blankets, plant dyes, and hand stitch. 

Some pieces were inspired by the monumental rock cuts of Northern Ontario highways. 

I'm packing my work this week.  

The exhibition with Penny Berens at the Mississippi Valley Textile Museum in Almonte Ontario is finally happening.  

I have five boxes of completed work to ship.  

I'll show what is going into Box Two in a couple of days.     

I am so glad to be finally getting this work out.

You must be getting bored with it. 

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.                   

medium regular

a six week update for this blanket piece 

photographed outside before the snow  

It's difficult to see progress on something this large when it is in your lap. 

Three full sized blankets across.   

Two or three hours each evening, during the netflix date with Ned, downstairs by the woodstove.

The stitch I"m using is couching, beautiful on both sides.  I was told that the reverse side (above) looks like a drawing of a field of grass.  I love that idea.

The front of the piece is shown in the photo below.            

Velvet and wool and rayon couched  to those blankets with wool yarn.

Walter Benjamin said that an original work of art possess an aura.

He said that a work of art emanates metaphysical qualities that can not be transferred by the photographic representation of it.

Benjamin said that the aura of an artwork is inextricably linked to its actuality or to the context of its production.

At the heart of his thinking is a conviction that real things have a profound effect on people.

We know this is true of textiles - they communicate so much more when we are with them in real life, rather than viewing them on our phone or laptop screens. 

Yet here I am, once again sharing my experience of this large work with photographic reproduction in a blog post.

This very large, very tactile object that I am pouring time and labour into. 

Maybe you can still sense the aura.

I'll post about it again in six weeks.

xo

Long was I hugged close, long and long (Walt Whitman)

I love this time of year, the colours and the gentle light

My husband makes piles of wood around our property

I've been working on this three-blanket-wide piece in my town studio, but I brought it home last month 

It was going so slowly there.  Now I work on in the evenings during our TV time.

The piece is inspired by the grandeur of the cambrian shield and the sliced-open immense rocks that line the northern highways that we drive through.  Time is made visible in those rock cuts.  

I'm covering the three blankets with a horizontal strata of plant-dyed fabrics, stitched with wool yarns.

The work is about touch and vulnerability and eternity. 

The reverse side is also beautiful I think.

 

Time is a material.   I add my loving pokes and pets and strokes and pulls and mends.  The fabric becomes energized, powerful.

"The clock indicates the moment - but what does eternity indicate? "  Walt Whitman