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.  

Soft Summer Gone

I’m Judy Martin and this is my quilt,
Soft Summer Gone.

It’s large.  One hundred inches square.  8 ½ feet – 2 ½ metres square

It’s simple, quiet and empty, yet at the same time, it is luscious and full of touch and time.

It’s entirely hand stitched.  Even the seams are layered, tucked and sewn by hand.
The quilting is hand embroidery.

Wool yarn is couched into a large gestural drawing, a swoopy windy cross.

The threads are many colours of silk floss in stem stitch. 

The fabrics are silk that I dyed with plants that grow where I live.
I live on an island in Lake Huron, one of North America’s great lakes.
The various yellows are from golden rod collected from fields and ditches.
That bit of blue is indigo.

I use a large oval hoop in my lap to do this – it took two years just to do the quilting.

My aim is to create textiles that connect with our inner world.

Consider the reverie that happens sometimes in nature.
A sudden time shift and we go back into childhood memory or leap forward into future hopes and dreams.
A feeling of well being.

My work employs the sense of touch, more powerful than the sense of sight for connecting to our emotional inner immensity. 

My work is large, simple, quiet, full of touch and time, similar to nature.

All photos of the quilt in this post are by Nick Dubecki, from Sudbury.
The photo of me with my back to the world is by Judith Quinn Garnett, a fellow exhibitor.
The photo of me with my lovely certificate is by my husband Ned, who drove me to the opening
.
Soft Summer Gone received two awards in Surface Design at this year's Quilt National.
see here for complete list of award winners at this year's exhibition.

delight

detail of front - silk with silk and wool thread, judy martin

most of the back, quilted with hand embroidery, silk with wool batt, judy martin 100 " square

I put my silk quilt through the gentle cycle with cold water and hung it on the line.

make my way without a map

say yes to the experience that comes

trust beyond measure

Luce Irigaray

At the same time

Repetition is a way to organize the world.
It is a way to help us experience our selves.

In the time it takes to look at the sixty four hankies I am basting into a grid
I experience many other kinds of time.

I experience life and find my own aesthetic in a series of disconnects.

Repetition invokes the already made (memory) at the same time that it invokes the possibility of making something new.

Proust reminds that it is the understated and the apparently indifferent that gives the necessary ground for heightened intensity.

(journal thoughts after reading The Infinite Line by Briony Fer)

silk quilt in progress

Work in progress.  120" square.

A tactile life

I am re-establishing a disciplined rhythm of work and life.
Stitching at least six hours a day, during breaks I harvest the plentiful wild plants along our road and in our property in order to process dye baths.
I visit my father.

Top: the two quilts that cover me in bed
Bottom: one of the new hand embroidered/quilted pieces in progress


"Our eyes, our ears, all of our senses are simply the indications of a veritable reality that ultimately resolves itself in our sense of touch."   Mark Rothko 

new work

Duet          silk and felt on vintage worked linen  2014

Naata Cloth      cotton and silk on linen, 2013

These new stitched pieces are included in the Lucky Protection Exhibition that continues at Artists on Eglin in Sudbury until Feb 28.  Click here to see the complete exhibition. 

starry night

Starry Night (detail above) hand stitched plant-dyed wool and silk.  2012

This piece showed in the 32nd quilts = art = quilts at the Schweinfurth Memorial Art Centre in Auburn New york in 2012.  It sold. 

It was still a baby.
Just hatched, left the nest.
These images are to give the piece some web-time. 

This blog is immediate, I can do it myself.
But it is a journal.
The references to family, environment and personal emotions give context to my work, but take away from a professional presentation. 
Nothing since 2009 is on my 'real' web site and sincere plans to update that get buried in the whirl of it all.
So for now...here it is.

it is impossible to say just what I mean

And indeed there will be time

There will be time, there will be time

Time for you and time for me

And time yet for a hundred in-decisions

And for a hundred visions and revisions

Before the taking of a toast and tea And indeed there will be time

To wonder

Do I dare?

And do I dare?

Do I dare disturb the universe? And would it have been worth it, after all?

Would it have been worth while

To have bitten off the matter with a smile

It is impossible to say just what I mean


T.S. Eliot
from the Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock 1917 (much pared down)

Seams

Conceptually, seams are interesting. They are used to join two wholes into a single larger whole. Sometimes they are made carefully, and finished. Sometimes they are layered, one over the other. Sometimes, you can barely tell where one idea joins with another, and things are seamless.
Theory and practice can be joined together with seams.

loss and realization

I cut up another quilt yesterday.It wasn't finished, and when I spread it out, I realized that it would never really satisfy me. Large, made mostly of uncut tussah silk, I was about half way through the dense quilting. I did love the size of it, and I do love the central square. I just did not love the circular part that I imposed on it last fall. Here's a photo from October. I am feeling regret and loss today. Mostly about the scale of the piece. One of the things that attracted me to quiltmaking in the first place was the large (bed) size.
Bed sized quilts are large in a natural feminine way, not pushy like ab-expressionist paintings. The messy stuff that accompanies the bed metaphor, the powerful feelings of nurturing and protection come with the large size. Large enough to cover a family. When I reduce the size of my quilts, I have to be more careful. I can't rely on the emotions that quilts bring up in the viewer. What was I thinking? I'm home alone- maybe that was the trigger. Solitude's gift is usually a break through, sometimes it's a realization.

I realize that SCALE IS IMPORTANT for me.
I am going to continue to work large.
When I make smaller pieces, (and I will of course) I'll ask myself, Why a quilt? Should this be a painting? Is it an embroidery?

Quilt 'baggage':
1. re-purposing fabric
2. warmth and protection
3. inner voice of women maker
4. exhuberance and joy using beauty and texture
5. the bed and all that goes on there.
6. covering up, covering over
7. the great tradition handed down by our fore-mothers.