poem blankets

I finished another poem blanket and then photographed all four, one at a time on the line with the beautiful morning light.   Two Rumi, One Neruda, and an Agnes Martin.

I like that these old blankets are worn, as if they are carrying lived time.  It is a most beautiful thing.  

This body of work addresses the bed.  Bed coverings connect to sex, death, birth, dream, the vulnerability of sleep, healing, reading, and that liminal space between sleep and wakefulness where we have the best ideas.  Blankets have a powerful voice.    

Blankets cause an emotional response. 

Emotional response is how I chose the text.  It had to be worth putting on a blanket.  

I thought that I could cover all the 'bed' things - but there are two love poems already.    

The final step is adding a wide strip of blanket cloth along the top to put a rod through so that they can hang on a wall.  

Old blankets bring past relationships to mind.  

They are connected to the body and to the most primal of human needs and acts.  (Radka Donnell)

spider circle webs in the grass

Try not to think that words are the material of thought.  The articulation of meaning can come through handling materials.  In fact, making through materials is a superior kind of thought.  Material is the most real thing that there is.  (Anni Albers idea) . 

"She clutched at her blankets as a faller clutches at the turf on the edge of a cliff.  Her eyes opened wide.  Here she was again, she thought, sitting bold upright in bed.  Awake."  

Virginia Woolf      To The Lighthouse

About the love poems.  Maybe it's OK if there are more of them than the other subjects.  

These four are going into a group exhibition next month and the images in this post are about preparing them for display and for shipping.   For more information about this show, please click here.

I don't think I'm finished with this body of work.  If I come across a poem that needs to be put onto an old blanket, I will put it onto an old blanket until I run out of old blankets.

Seen in Gore Bay yesterday.

Box One

I live on a sweet island.  

It is quiet here, just birdsong and wind in the trees.

The kinds of moments in nature that happen quickly and then are gone.

We remember them in our bodies.

I watch the lake every day.

The colours of the sky and the water change all the time. 

There are things in nature that we are unconsciously aware of.

The interconnectedness between the land, the air, and humanity is one of these.

I use all the senses in my work.

Smell, sound, touch, taste, sight and also the sixth sense - mystery.

Art is like nature.  It opens the inner world.

My work reflects the quietness of nature.

I work alone for long hours laying in repetitive marks inspired by nature's way.

I make large scale, hand stitched drawings and sculptures based on simple repetition.

I use domestic textiles and natural dye.  

I have been exhibiting my work for 40 years. 

The aesthetics of simplicity, time, labour and repetition ground my work.  

My completed works reflect who I am.  My work is me.

This is why I use dyes from my locale.  

This is why I use family textiles.

This is why I use large space. 

My language is the stitched mark.

I keep paring away anything else.

I've created a body of work using wool blankets, plant dyes, and hand stitch. 

Some pieces were inspired by the monumental rock cuts of Northern Ontario highways. 

I'm packing my work this week.  

The exhibition with Penny Berens at the Mississippi Valley Textile Museum in Almonte Ontario is finally happening.  

I have five boxes of completed work to ship.  

I'll show what is going into Box Two in a couple of days.     

I am so glad to be finally getting this work out.

You must be getting bored with it. 

rock cut on the lawn

rock cut side one, a two part sculpture to be hung from the ceiling,
rescued wool blankets and hand stitched wool yarn,
 each part 8 or 9 feet high and 13 feet wide, 
still in progress after 4 years of steady work by Judy Martin 

Two things:  repetition and simplicity.

rock cut part one, side one  French knots made with wool yarn on wool blanket

I use the same stitch.   Over and over.

Also obsession.

I get absolutely lost.  I enter a kind of dream world while my hands keep moving.

rock cut part two, side two, reverse of couching stitch, wool yarn on mended wool blanket

It's too much to understand, the hours and hours of time that are in the work.  

rock cut side two, a two-sided two part suspended sculpture,
rescued wool blanket, plant dyed wools, hand stitched 
each part 8 or 9 feet high,  13 feet wide,
looking puny on the lawn
but it is a big piece by Judy Martin, begun in 2015

Two sides.  That's because I want the viewer to move around the work so that the body is engaged, not just the eyes and mind.     

Because we know with our bodies.                   

medium regular

a six week update for this blanket piece 

photographed outside before the snow  

It's difficult to see progress on something this large when it is in your lap. 

Three full sized blankets across.   

Two or three hours each evening, during the netflix date with Ned, downstairs by the woodstove.

The stitch I"m using is couching, beautiful on both sides.  I was told that the reverse side (above) looks like a drawing of a field of grass.  I love that idea.

The front of the piece is shown in the photo below.            

Velvet and wool and rayon couched  to those blankets with wool yarn.

Walter Benjamin said that an original work of art possess an aura.

He said that a work of art emanates metaphysical qualities that can not be transferred by the photographic representation of it.

Benjamin said that the aura of an artwork is inextricably linked to its actuality or to the context of its production.

At the heart of his thinking is a conviction that real things have a profound effect on people.

We know this is true of textiles - they communicate so much more when we are with them in real life, rather than viewing them on our phone or laptop screens. 

Yet here I am, once again sharing my experience of this large work with photographic reproduction in a blog post.

This very large, very tactile object that I am pouring time and labour into. 

Maybe you can still sense the aura.

I'll post about it again in six weeks.

xo

Long was I hugged close, long and long (Walt Whitman)

I love this time of year, the colours and the gentle light

My husband makes piles of wood around our property

I've been working on this three-blanket-wide piece in my town studio, but I brought it home last month 

It was going so slowly there.  Now I work on in the evenings during our TV time.

The piece is inspired by the grandeur of the cambrian shield and the sliced-open immense rocks that line the northern highways that we drive through.  Time is made visible in those rock cuts.  

I'm covering the three blankets with a horizontal strata of plant-dyed fabrics, stitched with wool yarns.

The work is about touch and vulnerability and eternity. 

The reverse side is also beautiful I think.

 

Time is a material.   I add my loving pokes and pets and strokes and pulls and mends.  The fabric becomes energized, powerful.

"The clock indicates the moment - but what does eternity indicate? "  Walt Whitman

Do you know what a symbol is?

I've been absorbed with assembling a piece from vintage funeral wear.
Doing this helped me come back to and appreciate ordinary daily life.

The time before this pandemic crises seems like from another world. 
What was important for me at the beginning of March seems trivial now. 
My priorities and concerns have completely changed.

I've been having scattered disjointed thoughts, moodiness, despondency, weeping, and anxiousness.
Stitching into pieces already in progress (such as this one) helped immensely.

I reasoned that if I died, finished quilts would be easier to deal with. 

I'm still not able to do my real (usual) work - but I will someday.
This project was cathartic.

There was no warning that I would make this artwork.
It came all of a sudden and was a release.