another prayer cloth

I made a small quilt this month.  I'm calling it dream cloth.  

The name comes from Paul Klee's quote about imagination that is pinned on my studio wall.       

                "I dream and my soul awakens. Imagination is the star."       Paul Klee

The red Japanese Azumino cotton and the pink linen have been in my stash for a couple of years.  Putting them together in this piece was an impulsive decision.  I didn't think about it.  I reacted to the two colours together with my heart.         

Hand pieced and then hand quilted. 

I used big thread (pearl cotton) to quilt the star and regular hand quilting thread (black) from YIL to quilt the welsh circles and leaves in the surround.   

I've been wanting to try this type of quilting for a long time.    

You can see the design more clearly from the back of the quilt.  (silk fabric) (wool batt)   

I was glad to have it in the car when we went to Toronto to visit family in the middle of the month.  

The piece above is by Canadian artist, Anna Wagner Ott.  

It's the same colour as my dream cloth yet with an open heart shape. She called it Loving Red. 

I've admired Anna's work for a long time and am so glad to have been able to see one of her piece in real life at the World of Threads festival last fall.   

Anna Wagner Ott died in her sleep on Christmas night.  It was a sudden, unexpected death that shocked the textile community.  I feel as if I knew her, and although we did not meet, I am so sad that we are no longer able to be inspired by her constant making.  In 2022, Anna was interviewed by  fibre arts take two .  A tender obituary written by her daughters is on instagram, view it here.   

I like January because it seems empty after the bustle of the fall and then the holidays. This January seemed especially empty for me though and I was glad to have a solid, small quilt to complete. 

bundle of old sweaters

Veiled by Anna Wagner-Ott

the world

I couldn't tell one song from another

which bird said what or to whom or for what reason. 

The oak tree seemed to be writing something using very few words. 

I couldn't decide which door to open

they looked the same.

or what would happen when I did reach out

and turn a knob

I thought I was safe, standing there

but my death remembered its date.

Only so many summer nights still stood before me,

full moon, waning moon,

October mornings: what to make of them?  Which door?

I couldn't tell which stars were which or how far away any one of them was,

or which were still burning or not - 

their light moving through space like a long, late train - 

And I've lived  on this earth so long.  70 winters.

70 springs and summers, 

and all this time stars in the sky - in day light

when I couldn't see them

and at night when, most nights, I didn't look.

The text in this post is The World, a poem by Marie Howe (slightly edited : 70 instead of 50)

The images are of my stitching these past few weeks.

aesthetic pleasure

 

I have been procrastinating about writing anything this month.    

I will share some photos 

of the layers of linen and wool and sheer that I have been stitching with black and red thread.

It seemed so urgent that I stitch every day.

I thought I might get this one finished.   I told myself that finishing it was why I was stitching so much.

But that was not true.  

I was stitching so much because I was letting my own hands do what they do so well. 

My hands take care of me.

These past weeks, I read essays by women in old magazines and attended panel discussions on Zoom.

I went into my town studio a lot, and came home by the back roads, 

because the trees and ditches take care of me too.

In the essays,  I kept coming across words like care and nurture and support and retreat. 

The water in the lake is beginning to freeze.  

Can you can see the misty fairy hair?.

Aesthetic pleasure is important now, not just for its own sake, but to revive us, to give us the wherewithal to fight another day.      Aruna d'Souza             Canadian Art winter 2019

This piece is called Inner World. 

I'm finishing it up for an exhibition next spring.  All the work in the exhibition is two-sided.  

Most of the pieces are made by stitching first on one side and then another, 

and when they are displayed,  the 'other' or the inner side faces outwards.   

Inner World

Art has begun to feel not like a respite or an escape, but a formidable tool for gaining perspective on troubled times.                       Olivia Laing         The Guardian     April 2020

Stitching helps me because, for the several hours each day that I spend stitching, 

real time is stopped.  

The whirl of it.  The fear of it.

Making my art is like being in a zone of enchantment.

  

Whatever brings the consciousness into a state of pure attention, in a time of perplexity, will also give back an answer to the perplexity.          D.H. Lawrence  1928

The stars.

The sky and the stars.

In current climates, the act of taking time out of our day to make, time to look after yourself, time to be with loved ones, is important.  Modern quilting is all about time.  The moments we share with one another and the processes we choose to adopt to take care of ourselves.                                                    Julius Arthur           Embroidery Magazine      July/August 2021

There's a lot going on with my kids these days.  

Inner World

The title of the exhibition is Inside Out.  

Mark making is a way to make an effect on our own world.                                                          Margaux Williamson             Canadian Art     Winter 2019 

Art is an articulation of resilience.                                                                                                      People create art through war and pandemics and hardship and the work lives on for hundreds of years.                                                                    Tatum Dooley  The Guardian     April 2020                 

milky way, north star

Pawnee Star Map

painted with minerals on tanned leather,                                                                                                  the many tiny stars in the middle represent the milky way,                                                                          

A sacred object of the Skidi Pawnee tribe who lived in what is now Nebraska,                                Buffalo hunters, village livers, cosmic believers.  

When it entered the Field Museum in Chicago it was already between 100 and 300 years old, the north star is the largest cross

This post is a repost, the original is from this blog,  April 18, 2013.  There are lots of places to find these kinds of images and what we have learned about such precious items on the internet.  See what I mean here 

I am still interested in these ancient ways of looking at the sky.  I look at the sky every day.  I photograph the sunrise almost every day.

Stand up and face the east.  Now praise the sky and praise each person under the sky.                              It's okay to be unsure, but praise, praise, praise.                    Miranda July

time passes so quickly

Day by day it flies by, change happens.
Babies are born, they learn to speak, to walk,
then suddenly they are living four time zones away.

But things don't really change.
The sun gets up and goes down, the moon continues its 28 day cycle.
Ice comes into the lake and then goes out,
geese fly north in the spring, south in the fall.

I want to hold time.  It is so precious.

new biography

Judy Martin was born (1951) in the Fort Frances area of North Western Ontario and grew up on a large property with a lone elm tree that could be seen for miles.   Her father built and constantly renovated the family home,  her mother landscaped the yard with evergreens and filled the house with books and art supplies.

Judy married Ned Martin when she was 22 and the couple raised four children in three beautiful Northern Ontario locations, Thunder Bay, Kenora, and Manitoulin Island.  Judy and her husband continue to live and work on Manitoulin.

 Martin made her first quilt when she was 20, undaunted by the difficult pattern, Crown of Thorns.   She continues to make quilts but although her work has become simpler, it has not become smaller. Her textiles are like drawings, made from plant-dyed wool, silk, or re-purposed fabrics that have been sewn into artworks measured in feet rather than inches. 

 Martin believes that the sense of touch is the most effective way to make an emotional connection with another and her surfaces are covered with hand stitches. 

The repetition and weight of these marks over broad expanses of cloth seem to give access to our inner world.

While living in Kenora, Martin acquired an honours BFA degree from Lakehead University.  Her thesis exhibition included a sewn walk-through house and a wall quilt entitled Hold Me.  

Throughout the 90’s, Judy exhibited tender watercolour paintings of her children as well as quilts made from dyed and over-dyed fabrics.  In these textiles, she worked with two or more traditional quilt patterns in order to create a story or a poem using that feminine code.

 In 2012 Martin acquired a second university degree.  (first class honours BA in Embroidered Textiles from Middlesex University in the UK)  

She continues to study fine art and literature on her own, and keeps notebooks to help organize her constant search for meaning. 

Judy’s work has been widely exhibited across Canada as well as Europe, the United States, Japan and China. 

 In 2015 her stitched artwork was featured in the book Slow Stitch: Mindful and Contemplative Textile Art by Claire Wellesley Smith and in 2018, she received the Craft Ontario Volunteer Committee Mid-Career Award for Excellence. 

p.s.  It has been a while since I put information about my parents and my children into one of my biographies or about that lone Elm Tree that I grew up with.  More about the images can be found in the New Work blog, here  and here.