My quilts help me to be brave.

Last Tuesday Rachel from Breaking the Blocks / Crafty Monkees interviewed me.  She asks artists to talk about their lives and how their artwork helps them cope. I woke up that morning wondering what I might say. 

What are my "blocks"?  

How do I "break" them?  

One block would be isolation but the internet broke that one for me. 

Another could be the mothering of four kids.   Many people would say this.

Except that I truly believe that motherhood gave me a subject and a reason to create so it was not a block for me.  It was a door.

Maybe I could talk about the breakthrough that happened when I became aware of my inner world and how huge it is and how stitching gives that world to me.  

It's interesting that this interview comes along at the same time as I've been working on my memoir.

My recent self study gave me more confidence when I spoke with Rachel.   

1.  I grew up in an isolated rural place with lots of books and art supplies and plenty of solitude.

2.  I met and married Ned early and had the four kids.  We determined to raise them with natural beauty outside their door.  Around age 30 I discovered how I could use traditional quilt pattern as a code to tell the intimate stories that were happening in my life.  I did a lot of teaching of watercolour painting, art quilting and classical piano for about 20 years along with full time parenting.  It was a busy time. 

3  In 2005, we had an empty nest and this began a new period.  Digital photography.  The internet.  

In 2006, I started writing this blog.   I took a degree in embroidery from the UK.  I retired from in-person teaching.  Over the next twenty years I stepped back into solitude and into the inner world.  

4  I guess that I am now in the period of my 'late work'.  

The unavoidable fact of life is death, but handmade quilts challenge that.  My quilts will outlive me.

Human mortality is a major 'block' for everyone but those of us who create hand-made objects break that block.   

All the images in this post are of a piece that I thought was finished.  See it here on my website.   I cut it in half up the middle and put a lovely wool batt in between the two pieces.  I've really been enjoying stitching it during this beautiful month of May.  

The title will stay the same:  Sky With Many Moons.

The podcast is available where ever you get your podcasts. Rachel called our podcast The Art of Imperfection.  Here is a link.   

solitude is a place

Q  Where have you been?  

A   I've been visiting a place that encourages me to work by instinct.

Q  What is the name of that place?

A   Solitude.

Q  Don't you get lonely?

A  Sometimes.  Most of the time I'm fine.  

Q  What do you do all day? 

A  I make my own coffee and don't follow my usual routine. 

There is absolutely no agenda on the weekends. 

However, during the work week,  I work.

The difference is that the solitude gives me a feeling of freedom.

I can't explain it. 

I don't think about the work first.   I don't plan it.

I just start.  

It's as if I am a four year old child and the adult who loves me gives me construction paper and scissors and  crayons and says:  "make art".  

So I just start.  The adult who loves me (myself) tells me to. 

Q  Can you give us an example?

A  One example is the new quilt that I started two weeks ago.  

I didn't know that I was going to make it when I went to bed the night before.

It's a huge piece, at least 100 inches square, but very light. 

I am using up the cotton that I painted with iron water dots in July 2020.

That cloth had been folded up in a basket for nearly two years.  

Q  So you follow the materials?

A  Yes. 

I also think that something intuitive happens with the passage of time and personal and world events.    

My brain didn't know, but my spirit and body did.

"knowledge grows slowly like a wisdom tooth"  said poet Adam Zagajewski

Q  Any other examples?

A  I did make some break throughs in other media.  I may post about them in the future, not now.  

Q  Tell about the circle stitching that you are doing.

A  After mounting the exhibition last fall I had started an embroidery on some wool cloth dyed with avocado.  It was like hugging myself, going round and round with the running stitch, but I had put it aside.  I picked it up again in May.  I hope to finish it this summer.   

Q  So this avocado piece was not planned either?  

A  That's correct.  The two pieces in this post have no plot.  They tell a story, but there is no plot.

Q  But I thought that you sketched in your sketch book and worked with the design wall.  

A  With these pieces, I sketch them after I've stitched on them rather than before.  

I figure out what to do while I do it.    

Q  How come you have solitude in May?

A  Well, it's a busy time for my husband so he's been going in to work rather than working from home.  He's also been away opening our cottage for one of the weekends and this last week, he's been on a fishing retreat with the guys.  He comes back home today.  I will be glad to see him and have him here with me at night.  

Q  Do you always have projects like this when he is away?

A  Probably.  But I think that this year something is different.

I seem to trust myself more.  I don't care if I please others.   

I don't know where it is coming from, but I am letting it come.

Q  Please tell us about your unique mark making.

A  Timeless geometric motifs have become my language: Circles, dot grids and simple running stitch.  

And like a mother tongue, I speak them without thinking. 

They seem so normal to me, yet at the same time,

I know that they are not normal because the way I use them is my own personal language. 

Q  Do you have a philosophy?

A  I am a woman artist.

I look at the horizon from my window or I sit outside and listen to birds.

I always have stitching in my lap.

The archetypes and the female in me rise up like clouds and stars in the sky and I let them.

Carl Jung struggled with understanding his own unconscious. 

He tried to find an image for the feeling, as if that would help him understand the feeling. 

He identified the first shapes that all humans seem to understand.  

It is difficult to translate our inner reality into a visual symbol.

Abstract art is a valid way. 

Abstract art with the touch of my hands it my way.   

"Classical art depends on inspiration.  It exists in the mind, it doesn't exist in the world.

Many artists live socially without disturbance to mind,

but others must live the inner experience of mind,

a solitary way of living." 

Agnes Martin. 

"I found a means to express my vital concerns as a woman; 

my body, my feelings, my relationship to others, my frustrations 

and my values: tenderness, resourcefulness, endurance."  

Radka Donnell

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Just a quick note here to let people know that I am fine.    

The exhibition is beautiful and I will write more about that soon.

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Things keep changing in Blogland, and it's hard to keep up. 

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I'm home now and loving being here after traveling to the exhibition near Ottawa and visiting some of our grown children and young grandchildren in Ottawa and Toronto.  

These days I am cleaning and decluttering my house, gathering my life story from my old journals and stitching in the mornings on my 90 inch square muslin and indigo quilt, grateful for it.   

The island state is a state of remaining within one's own boundaries, undisturbed by any external influence; it resembles a kind of narcissism or even autism.   One satisfies all one's needs on one's own.  Only the self seems real.    Olga Tokarczuk