trunk show #5: the house with the golden windows

The House with the Golden Windows, East Wall. (about 5 feet wide )

This post is a continuation of that trunk show series I started last fall, just after speaking to the Pomegranate Guild in Toronto. Putting it up on my blog gives me a reason to photograph older pieces in digital format. It's been slow going.

When I spoke in Toronto, I just took the East and West walls of my HOUSE but there are four walls altogether, each with an inner and an outer side. North and West are click-able. The outside of the house is made from women's decorating magazine papers. I suppose they represent our some day dream house. There is a certain time of day when the sun’s reflection makes windows go golden and magical. machine stitched with miles of thread, the outer wall was then distressed in the dryer. House with the Golden Windows, East Wall from the inside.

The inside windows were my view from the windows of our home in Kenora. I took one photo a day for one year from whichever window seemed best on that day. There weren't many photos from the East facing windows, as our view was blocked by the large house next door. It was just lucky that the neighbours chose that year to replace their major appliances, and leave their old ones by the back door for months.

I made this cloth and paper house for my BFA graduate exhibition from Lakehead University in 1993. It was then shown four more times over the next few years. The House with the Golden Windows, 1993, machine stitched paper and photos, dyed canvas, hand embroidery, shown as installed in A Space Gallery in Toronto in 1994

Trunk Show #4: Something More Magical Than It Ever Was

Something More Magical Than It Ever Was log cabin quilt, light and dark pattern, recycled family clothing and silk with photo transfers and sequins, machine pieced, hand quilted, 90" x 90" , 1991
I turned 40 in 1991 and had a solo show in the Thunder Bay art gallery that year. I showed the calendar series and this quilt in that show. It’s a piece about memory. Listening to my twelve year old daughter talk about her own childhood made me realize that people remember the way they want to. I was there after all, and remembered her childhood too. Back of Something More Magical ... disperse dye transfer, satin, cotton, embroidery The piece uses the clothing from our Thunder Bay time, when the older children were babies and one of the photo transfers is of Jay learning to walk. I made the quilt when we lived in Kenora, about the beautiful feelings I had for Thunder Bay but in reality our life had not been perfect. Ned was searching for his vocation and our family lived in a converted garage. I remembered what I wanted to remember. We all do. I finished a part time degree in Fine Art from Lakehead University during our time in Kenora. I graduated in 1993, and that same year we moved to Manitoulin Island. Studying fine art gave me sanity and a purposeful creative outlet in that mothering time of my life. I loved learning. I felt validated by my studies. I felt that my own experience as a creative woman with children was worth communicating AND that it was worth communicating with textile artwork.

Trunk Show #3: Calendar

February family photos, lace, wool, corduroy, acrylic paint, ribbon, buttons. about 27" square 1988-89June family photos, dyed cotton organdy, thread, about 25" square 1988-89 September family photos, pages from nursery rhyme books, cotton, thread, about 32" square 1988-89 December family photos, christmas cards, wool, taffeta, pine cones, embroidery thread, beads, about 28" x 26" 1988-89

Calendar Series

For one year, just after our youngest was born, I had doubles made of all the photographs I took of our kids just being themselves. Then I made a wall piece for each month using those doubles as a starting point. I used seasonally appropriate fabrics for each month. June is a single layer of dyed organdy, light as air, blue as a summer sky.
These are drugstore processed snapshots. Not digital images, not photo transfers.
Oona was 10. Above she is shown with Grace, age 3. (detail of December) Jay was 8. (detail of September) Grace (detail of February April was only one year old then. (detail of June)

Motherhood consumed me throughout the 80’s and 90’s. In 1983 we had moved from Thunder Bay where Ned and I had a Finnish farm to the paper mill town of Kenora in NorthWestern Ontario. The older two children were born in Thunder Bay, the younger two in Kenora.

There are twelve of these, one for each month but I only took these four to the September trunk show in Toronto. It's interesting to me, that even then, I was obsessed with documenting the swift passage of time. It's especially evident with young children - they grow up so very fast.

Trunk Show #2: self portrait

I'd like to start at the beginning of my quilt story. Self Portrait 1985 Painted cotton, maternity clothes, hand pieced and quilted.

For years and years my artwork and my life were wrapped up with my own motherhood. My husband and I have four children, and this piece was made the year the third one was born.

It is not my first quilt.

Notice that the fourth side has no border, just a binding. I see it as a premonition of the fourth baby yet to come. I cut up the maternity clothing I wore and re-arranged it. Why I used white quilting thread remains unexplained. That the mother is nursing her babe and drawing at the same time is how I was. How I still am. An artist and as good a mother as I can be...at the same time.


This post is the second in a proposed series in which I will share the quilts I took to Toronto on September 21 for my talk to the Pomegranate Quilt Guild.

Trunk Show #1: Introduction

Power and Beauty, Amish diamond in square quilt, dyed wool, hand stitched with mirror work. Unfinished.

I'm preparing a trunk show to take to Toronto tomorrow. I'm considering using this unfinished piece in the introduction. (Sorry, but I don't have a photo that includes the 12 inch Amish style borders) My trunk show connects my art and my life.

Introduction

I grew up on a farm in North Western Ontario.

My mother was an intellectual. Her parents were English/Irish. Her mother was the local artist. Her father a damaged WWI vet.

My father was an entrepreneur. His mother only spoke Finn. She wove Finnish rugs.

I’m 50 percent Finnish and the Finnish aesthetic – one of simplicity, elegance, noble poverty and love of nature informs my very being and all my work.

I’m finding that inner Finn more and more each year. The quilt that you see here has not been shown in public before. It’s not finished. It’s like me. I’m not finished either. I feel that I'm on the brink of a new and simple way of working.

This quilt is an Amish design embellished with Indian mirror work. Two very different cultures are brought together. Like so much of today's contemporary world, this piece is a hybrid.

I turned 60 this past summer. Emily Carr Visited Me 2005, painted and stitched rayon, pieced, appliqued, hand quilted. Turning 60 is a huge deal and instead of denying it, I am celebrating it. I am aware that the time available for me is limited. I believe that my best work is yet to come.

Emily Carr made her best work AFTER she gave up her boarding house business and went into the BC rainforest alone. She was 57.
detail. The blanket stitch embroidery is also the quilting stitch. oil on paper by Emily Carr.
This is when she painted her swirling skies and trees. She painted them when she was in her 60's.
oil on paper, Emily Carr oil on paper, Emily Carr. She painted all of these in her late 50's and early 60's. I am inspired by Emily Carr and her spirit continues to visit me and encourage me. My quilt appropriates her famous oil painting Scorned as Timber, Beloved by the Sky, that she painted when she was 64. But this is just the introduction.