In touch

A post about the cloth I've been working on these past two weeks.     

 

I'm adding complete skeins of cotton floss in horizontal rows to a wool patchwork, couching the thick threads firmly through several layers with red sewing thread.  I want to make a texture that you will yearn to touch.

I took it with me to stitch while Ned drove us to visit family in Eastern Ontario and Quebec.  We took the rural roads whenever possible, and there was no snow.

Look.  This happens so often and is not planned.  Suddenly I notice the similarity in what my eyes see and the marks my hands make.   

We visited our twin grand daughters.

They've started to walk!  They eat solid foods with gusto!  They play together.  They love music.

We had a wonderful time with them.  

I want to get in touch with something more mindless, more intuitive.  I'm not clear about the meaning.  Maybe its the spectator who puts the meaning in.  

I don't work from experiences that are fresh.  I tend to repeat things.  I've carried thoughts around in my head for months.  I have a feeling about a form that I want and I want the feeling to develop as far as it can go, and I want my work to be able to stand a lot of inspection.  Vija Celmins

I'm back at home now and continue with this mindless stitching.   I read an old Border Crossings magazine the other day and Vija Celmins was interviewed in it by Robert Enright.  What she said resonated with me so much I had to note her responses into my journal.  In fact, her words inspired me to make this post.  

See Vija Celmins’ art work in the most recent Modernist Aesthetic post.  Click  here.  

My feeling is that when you are not using your brain, you are not necessarily being stupid.  It's just that you're in touch with some other things in yourself.  Then they become brainy. . Because look how we talk about the art afterwards.  We can talk about these pieces in an intelligent way even though the work itself is ..... what is the work like?  I don't know..  I don't know what the work is like.   Vija Celmins

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. 

What are you working on now?

I'm taking turns stitching into two pieces.
Connected by their design, both are large nine-patches.

One is stitched with black thread, the other with white thread.

expectations/memories/dreams

 

Circles within squares are design elements they have in common.

The cloth was found in my life collection of small pieces of fancy cloth.
(taffeta, linen damask, wool suiting, and silks of all sorts)

I stitched or painted on all the squares earlier. 

At first I thought that maybe they didn't need hand stitch
I was hoping to love their simplicity more.

But now,  the chika-chika marks of running stitch/ kantha stitch
has risen the level of intimacy in these two wall pieces
and has given them power.

(...and they fit into my suitcase.  Hola from Mexico xo)

I was waiting I was waiting

By Chance

That's what John Cage said when Anni Albers asked him how he started to find his way in his work.

 so "Don't worry"

says Anni Albers

Images in this post are of two pieces of art that I have in my house this week that will go back to rightful owners soon.

The stitched piece (Beginning with Time), was loaned for an exhibition in Thunder Bay and the painting of pussy willows with text by Anne Michaels needs some repair.