a pilgrimage

pilgrimage:  noun

a journey made to some sacred place as an act of devotion

a visit made to a place that is considered special, where you go to show your respect

I visited the Royal Ontario Museum when I was in Toronto last month.  The main reason to visit was in order to see this quilt, then on display in the special exhibition of  Quilts: Made in Canada.  

I met my brother and Kirsten there.

Pieced Triangles Quilt 1880
  Maker no longer known. 
 Asphodel-Norwood Township, Ontario. 
 Roller-printed cotton, plain weave

Look closely at this quilt: it's made of over 8000 light and dark triangles, each less than 2 centimetres long and hand-stitched together to create an intricate pattern from the smallest scraps.

The patient maker who sewed it worked outwards from the centre, creating a series of rectangular frames that slowly increase to build a quilt.  (wall text)  

I look at the movement of the colours

I sense the amount of time that each triangle took to place.

I appreciate the passage of time that this quilt has remained even though the maker has passed on.

I marvel at the accuracy of the intricate handwork.

I understand this woman.  

My imagination is engaged.

My interior world is entered into.

Her repeated touching reaches me at an intimate, personal level.

The sense of touch is powerful. 

"The impact of art touches something buried deep in embodied memory.  It is a mystery."  

Juhani Pallasmaa 

I'm here

My work is grounded in the phenomenological idea that the sense of touch is the most effective way to make an emotional connection with others.   Judy Martin

I am in Toronto, delivering my new body of work to David Kaye Gallery today for installation.  Here is the text that David sent out to his subscribers in an email.

Please join me from 2:00 - 4:00 p.m. on Saturday, October 7th to meet textile artist JUDY MARTIN and view her amazingly stitched thread wall drawings/objects. Never one to sit idle without needle and thread JUDY has created an incredible body of work. She says, "The exhibition it is about the process of making and the stitched objects are just the evidence of time and labour. Making things by hand is a very positive and nurturing thing for anyone to do. Creating the pieces for this exhibition has been healing for both my body and spirit."

I have been looking forward to (and working towards) this day for a year.  So excited. xo

Mended World on the dining room table

I brought Mended World home from the church so that I could package it up for exhibition at the International Quilt Festival in November.

Having it on the dining table rather over whelmed me.
There is so much touch in this piece.
So much time.
So much attention and intention.
It's 94 inches square.  Full image here.

In 1977, Adrienne Rich wrote about women's tasks.  She included world protection, world preservation and world repair in her list.

This quilt is made from donated or thrift shop table linens.  Over 100 people worked on it.

Mended World is the second panel (of four) in the Manitoulin Circle Project.  It was installed in the sanctuary of Little Current United Church in 2012.       

In 1971, Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro initiated Woman House, "a repository of the daydreams women have as they wash, bake, cook, sew, clean and iron their lives away"

Repairing the world while sewing our lives away.

My densely stitched quilts are so sensuous
they yearn to be touched

How many of them will it take to mend the world?

How many of them can I day dream my life away in?

the tenderness, the beauty

We drove north on the back roads

 I stitched.

Our new baby :three days old above, six days old below

art is not about art.  art is about life.
Louise Bourgeois

safe

One of the reasons I make quilts is that they make me feel so good.
I love to make them and I love to be wrapped in them.
The weight of those layers of fabric and miles of thread, combined with months of embedded, repeated touching is a perfection of comfort.

Above is a pencil drawing I did in 2009.
In it, I'm wrapped in Something More Magical Than It Ever Was.  also see here
A similar drawing with When Asked She Replied is on my website - see here.,  the quilt here

If that is why I make quilts, why do I blog?
Is this blog another cover-up?
Do I pull it over me when I need to feel in touch?

I'm sad that Leonard died.
I'm sad that Donald won.

I have a lot of readers who come from pinterest to visit images of work from years ago.
I do not need to write new blog posts for them.
I need to write for me.
I need to feel in touch.

I'm going to try to be more honest here.  (not safe) 

feel with your eyes

In the biography of you on World of threads, it states 'handwork adds the sense of touch, a sense more psychologically profound than the sense of sight."  What did they mean?  Question 6 of Martha Sielman's ten intelligent questions she sent me last December as we were preparing the article.

The idea comes from Merleau Ponty.  I know the answer to Martha's question because I studied phenomenology and I am a mother.

work in progress   spirit 

There are five senses.  Touch, sight, smell, taste, sound.  All add to our knowledge and our memories. Over several centuries, we have come to think that the sense of sight is the most important.

Sight is important.   It is how we know with our minds.  Sight helps us think.  Seeing something makes it real.

But the sense of touch is how we know with our heart and body.
Unnameable.
More primal.

Our skin is the biggest organ.
our fingers, the bottoms of our feet

Feeling, it's emotional.

Art is responded to with emotion.  Agnes Martin

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 

One of Sandra Brownlee's tactile notebooks

In this post, photos of just one of the many notebooks Sandra Brownlee brought to the workshop last week.  Click here to see a photo of her suitcase of journals.

"I love fabric.  It has life in so many dimensions: practical, structural, literary, symbolic, cultural, personal, visceral.  It's been my ongoing avenue for expression and exploration.  Weaving, drawing, and writing are synonymous for me."  Sandra Brownlee

"For thirty years I worked at the loom, fascinated by the ritual and orderly building of the fabric.  Initially I wove cloth and explored textile traditions.  The loom subsequently gave me a place to allow my intuition to guide me as I created intimate black and white fields of patterns, marks, and figures." 

"At the same time, there were also my notebooks."

"Working in my notebooks has always been a vital part of my creative life."

"Since childhood, keeping a notebook has been my way of making the physical world and my responses to it more vivid."

"There is both discipline and liberation in this commitment to documenting on a regular basis a moment or experience."

"My notebooks have increasingly become sensory delights containing expressive studies and inventions, objects in themselves."

"Now, inspired by my notebook practice, my work is moving in new directions."  Sandra Brownlee

"I trust the intuitive and the spontaneous.  Through my senses, particularly the tactile and visual, I come to understand words."

"Through touching, stitching, gathering, and working in my notebooks their meanings become clear.  The tactile component allows me to respond and improvise."

"It focuses me so that the rest of the world falls away, and I become engaged in the creative process."  Sandra Brownlee

grand daughter Aili 6 weeks old on mother's day

dad 91 years old on May 14, 2014

Photos of  Sandra Brownlee's notebooks are by Judy Martin with permission from the artist.  Photos of my hand as a bridge across generations are also by me.

Cloud Over Water

Cloud Over Water, Paterson Ewen 1979.  Acrylic and Metal on gouged plywood 

I visited this painting by Canadian Artist Paterson Ewen (1925 - 2002) again last weekend.   
It is one of my favourites in the Art Gallery of Ontario's permanent collection.

I can imagine what it must have been like to make it.  The three pieces of heavy wood lifted to a surface and then drawn into with a noisy router. Why?
Because those marks had everything to do with the emotional connection from artist to viewer that comes with the sense of touch.

Ewen's muscular methods connect with my own body's haptic memory.  There is a sense of time and labour in this work that somehow,  in addition to the horizon imagery, sets me off.  I go into my own world. 

My sister Nancy came to Manitoulin to see Dad and we met in Toronto first.
Nancy's an artist and has two web sites.  Here and here.