circles repeated and repeated

what endures?

old cloth

a spiritual place covered with marks

the directness of paint with the substance of thread

communication with the environment

large scale

immensity of space, minutiae of surface

the time we need to cope with life and death

and the light poured in

I look around me and
everything seems , what's the word I seek,
ephemeral?
beautiful? 

 spiritual?

I've been alone for a few days, not quite a week. 
The empty spaces became filled with green
and my needle kept going in and out, in and out

I made things in the evenings that I had not even considered when I woke up
My fabrics piled up around me and the light poured into the house

it poured in

it revealed  beauty I hadn't noticed
and also that unnamable something....

I've gone back and forth to my studio in town,
making making making

looking at the water and the sky

writing and unwriting journals

 a kind of transformation is going on inside me

a shifting

When you make something you have proof that something has been accomplished, something is different.  It's proof that there has been a change.  You have made a physical change. You have made a thing.  It's through the physical world that you can have a spiritual life.  It is about transendence.  Something has moved from one state to another.  Art is proof.  Art moves your insides into the physical world.  It doesn't rob you of your insides, it;'s just a representation and it's always different.  It's like a mystery and you're trying to rein it in or something. 

Kiki Smith speaks this way

the poetics of space

We think we know ourselves but all we know is a sequence of fixations in the spaces of our being.

In order to analyze ourselves we need to put our important memories on the plane of daydream.

Memory is a strange thing.
Memories are motionless.
The more securely they are fixed in space, the sounder they are.
Space - not time - is important.

The unconscious is housed in the space of its own happiness.

Think of your intimate inner spaces as if a map.
Like a drawing that is not exact.
Psychic weight is dominant in this domain.

The real houses of memory are not able to be described, they are so intimate

Just mention them and you are set on the threshold of your daydream.
You find repose there.

All we communicate to others is an orientation towards a secret,
without ever being able to tell the secret.
The great function of poetry is to give us back the situation of our dreams.

Gaston Bachelard

To move slowly alongside

The solitude and quiet emptiness that I find on Manitoulin continues to be very important to my development as an artist.  I intentionally withdraw from people and put a lot of time into my work.  I touch my work a lot as I stitch it.

My pieces are large and simple, which makes it easy for my viewer to enter them.  They are safe, calm places.   I consider them a gift and am generous with the labour I put into my work.

I am planning an installation that uses old wool blankets to make a monumental walk-through corridor.  The rock cuts along the new highway 400 are the inspiration for this new work.  In northern Ontario, large areas of the Canadian Shield have been sliced open by blasting and heavy equipment to reveal eons of time and layers of beautiful sediment and crystals and minerals.

From the speeding car, we are able to look with awe at these magnificent grand pieces of Canada.  Trees grow on top of some of them.  There is something spiritual within these rock cuts.  The car keeps on moving.

My installation of blankets will encourage people to walk slowly alongside at an intimate closeness to the work.   I hope that people will experience the scale and weight of the familiar wool fabric, with their bodies.  Yearning to touch but not touching, and somehow feeling some deep truth of lived emotions that are part of our human experience.

The installation will have two parts, each part made from two or three blankets sewn together and bordered top and bottom with still more blanket cloth.  One part is shown in this post, and it measures 14 feet wide and 10 feet high.  The nick name for this part is Ash and Rose.

Blankets are already full of human time before I work with them.  Generations of time.  The marks of those hands and bodies have left signs of wear and all I have done is add more time and touch with hand stitch.  Both sides.

Materials such as blankets that relate to our universal human experiences in bed where things like birth, death, power or lack of power, pain, comfort, protection, and sex happen, are powerful metaphors.  Making crafted objects from them is contemporary art.

I work with hand stitch and used domestic cloth.
I make hand made things that invite the use of all our senses, especially the sense of touch. 

my work with me

I am on vaycay with my husband. 

We had ten days in Mexico with our Anchorage family.  Now they are back home.
They survived the earthquake and are still experiencing aftershocks, but they are safe.

Then we had another week and Canadian friends arrived.

  I brought my work with me.

I don't do it all the time, but some times.

It holds the heat and wind of this place some how. 
Each stitch wraps time snugly.

This slow time in Mexico
is threaded to my heart and will remain.
Somehow. 

where do your ideas come from?

What a huge question

The first thing that comes to mind is that my ideas come from MY LIFE.

It is the most obvious answer.  But our lives are so immense aren't they?  

answer:  Place
a)   the environment I currently live in and experience is a source of ideas.  It is awesome to live in Northern Ontario.  Driving to Manitoulin from any direction places me between rock cuts and close to clear lakes.
And Manitoulin Island is full of spirit.  I seek solitude here.  It is quiet with water horizon views.  
Also the SKY is a source of ideas.  Moon, sun, stars, clouds, blue-ness, hugeness, above-ness.

b)
where I grew up, a farm in North Western Ontario, with big fields and a spectacular lone elm tree.
I always felt isolated there.
My parents and siblings had a big impact on me, and still do.  

c)
I study art every day.
I look at reproductions in books and read about artists and their ideas and lives.
I write about these things in my journal, sometimes inspired to try something immediately. 
Art study is a passion of mine.

d)
My journals. 
I gather thoughts in them every day.
I re-read them.  I find and develop my own ideas in these journals.
There is true-ness in the journals

e)
My mothering.
It is ongoing, and continues to give me more than you can imagine.

f)
Strong emotions such as great sadness, furious anger, or physical fraility may be where I start a piece.
However, although these pieces may begin with vehement negativity, as I work into them with my hands, those emotions are displaced, replaced with a glowing serenity.
I feel serene after so much time with the work in my lap, and the completed works are calm.

What is an idea really?  So often it begins as just a glance - a speck
something off to the side.
after so many years at this art-game, now I recognize the feeling of that speck
I grab it from the air and write about it or sketch it into my current journal
and move on with my day.  
It usually takes me a few days of sleeping and moving before I feel it as an IDEA, not just a glance.

I have inner dialogue with my self.  
I imagine that all humans do to some extent.

My heart responds to stimulation so quickly and generously, 
and I want to make art that will allow my open heart to speak.
I want to make work that is as true to how I understand my life as possible. 
So that when another human encounters my work, that person will know me. .

And also, even more
I hope that person's heart and inner self will recognize something in my work
that resonates deep within them. 

And they know something more about them selves.

But I am side-tracked away from the question about where ideas come from.

I guess the short answer is that
I don't know.

To live an absolutely original life one only has to be oneself.  Agnes Martin

All images in this post are of a new large scale work in progress.