your silence creates a world for my language

This is a post about an exhibition currently on view in Sault Ste Marie, Ontario at the artist run gallery, 180 projects.  A friend and I made the trip last week to view it.  It was my first art gallery experience in 18 months and well worth the 3+ hour drive.    

The artist is Sophie Anne Edwards, one of north eastern Ontario's most intelligent and passionate advocates for culture.  She is a poet, a painter, a curator, a geographer, and a long time arts administrator on Manitoulin Island.  I am enriched to know her. 

Sophie is easily brought to tears by the environmental crises and wanted to create a body of work that would address this monstrous, overwhelming fear in a personal way.  The artist's home is surrounded by ash trees, and she fears that they will all die because of a silent killer brought to Canada from Asia through international trade, the Emerald Ash Borer.  

The Emerald Ash Borer is an insect that drills through the outer bark to lay eggs in ash trees.  The larvae hatch and tunnel under the bark of the ash tree during the year or so while they mature, chewing lines that silently remove the inner wood.  

Another concern of this artist is something that happens more frequently than we know, yet is kept secret; domestic abuse to women and girls.  The victims are scarred for life, .  

Sophie became my CSARN mentee in 2018 and we talked and cried together over a period of  nearly 2 years.  Her ideas about materials and what she wanted to say with her artwork were strong.  Why did she come to me?  I think that she needed to slow down.  She needed to realize the comfort of hand stitch.  Although she already understood the power and intimacy of this kind of mark making, I helped her to focus on just a few of her ideas and taught her the back stitch.  

"I think about quiet violences -- to the environment, to women.  The silences that go unnoticed, or unspoken.  That happen quietly, under bark and behind closed doors.  That are carried in on crates, and through hushed words. "  Sophie A Edwards

Sophie Edwards wrapped one of the ash trees near her residence
with a bed sheet marked with red thread and hawthorns and left it for two years.  
A video of her suturing this ineffectual protection is part of the exhibition. 

"Those that go unregulated, and those that regulate us  The silences that change a landscape, and a life.  This project explores and links environmental and sexual violences."  Sophie A Edwards

"There is a silent language we can read in the Emerald Ash Borer tracks, and there is a silence we keep about sexual violences, which leaves its own tracks and traces.  This silence leaves space for the language of invasive and invaders."  Sophie A Edwards

There is a beautiful catalogue available from the artist or from 180 projects that has gorgeous photos of the exhibition and more of Sophie's own words.  

in my traces you will find silence,

or bring your own to it.

In my tracks you will find the language 

of my having been.

In my marks there is the 

record of my passage.  

Unable to read my lines,

you cannot hear.  Your

silence creates a world

for my language.

Sophie Anne Edwards

The exhibition continues until July 17.  180 projects

wrecked

People are not aware of their abstract emotions,
which are a big part of their lives,
except when they listen to music
or look at art.

Agnes Martin

A woman made utility quilts as fast as she could 

so that her familly wouldn't freeze, and

she made them as beautiful as she could 

so that her heart wouldn't break.

American folk saying

image from April 2012
both quotes from my current journal
glad to be walking on my road again, the ice has gone. 

feel better

I made my first bundles after my mother died in 2007.  I was inspired by Magdalena Abakanowicz's burlap and sisal pieces that she made in 1978-80 entitled Embriology.  She made about 800 bundles in a variety of sizes.

I used soft batting at first (see here) and they took me about six months to carefully make. I was teased a bit, (Ned referred to them as hoo-doos), but I was coming to understand that it was the process of making that was helping me to deal with my recent personal trauma.

After them I began to wrap tree branches and clover stalks as a way to connect caring for the environment with a human metaphor of nurturing.

Although the good feelings would come over me as I wrapped the branches, the resulting bundles raised more complicated emotions.  The figures I made looked shrouded, not swaddled.  They looked mummified and sad. (see here if interested)

As an artist who wishes to communicate on an emotional level, this set up a challenge for me.  The bundles on the wall here are white with red thread, but they did not begin like this.  They have been wrapped three times.  They started off in 2011 as happy little things with four coniferous twigs wrapped in colourful cloth.  See here.

Over time, those twigs became bald and I needed to nurture them, and so wrapped them first with thick yarn, and then as you see here, with soft white cloth.

Arranging each of these little bundles in my hands, each one different from the next, gave me the same positive feelings as those first wrapped forms had.

In order to understand this perhaps you need to do it yourself.  The materials are here.  Make a bundle and take it home.

 Try it, you will feel better.

These images from my installation up until April 18 at la galerie du nouvel ontario in Sudbury, Ontario, part of a curated exhibition entitled Pop Folk Textiles  The text is from my little artist-talk at the vernissage.

beginning with time: day

Another update on the wild pure piece.
I've been stitching diligently and have filled the central area with strips of plant dyed wool stitched with wool threads.

It's so large, I can't get back far enough to photograph it head on.  It covers the entire design wall in my home studio...the photo above was taken from the doorway.  98 inches wide, 85 inches high.

The earthy warm brown of the reclaimed overdyed wool blanket (previously pink) is becoming connected to the central part with rows of seed stitch.  

We've lost our snow.  The day is dark and rainy here.
I'll show the night side of  Beginning With Time in a future post.

A New Year

the door from Notre Dame cathedral in Paris, France

trees along ontario highway

I've been blogging since 2006.   Blogging has given me a way to see connections and to make sense of so many things.  Blogging has rewarded me with new friends around the world.   The two images in this post were chosen with my eyes shut from the zillions I've posted in the last seven years.  I don't know what the next year will bring, but .....

Not to Know, but to go ON!!!!

Be well in 2014 my dear friends.

woody branches

Cedar twiggy branches

were used along with river rock to hold aspen branches erect in tall glass cylinders.

We needed about a dozen for the wedding,

so that each table had a tree.

milkweed

new hand work

 This week I returned to those spring branches that I had bundled up before we went to England. 

I added another layer to most of them, sometimes from old lace, sometimes a wrapping of new cotton tape.  I also put a little protective thread on each one. 

Now there are eight.   Pioneer Babes.  Budding branches, vintage domestic linen and lace, red thread.

 beauty and tragedy. 

These fragments of old hand work connect me to those brave women who left Europe and came to Canada.

The most important thing is to love and be loved.
The second most important thing is to do the work.  
Michael James

nourishment

 I am exploring the idea that the act of creating is self nourishment.   Perhaps even more than it is self expression.

This bundle of cedar branches was wrapped months ago, but now is re-shaped,  wrapped again, this time with wool yarn.

Wrapping...it's like chanting.

my two mothers

2007

2007

 Ned's mother died in October 2006, my mother died in May 2007.  In the summer of 2007, I wrapped this beautiful but dead white pine in memory of my two mothers.

2008

2009

2010

2010

2011

2012

It takes five years to write a poem.
"you shatter it down until you get to a line - a word"  Leonard Cohen