journal entries from the middle of March

Sunday:  

Idea:  to work from the back, to use more colour, to cut silk in narrow strips, to couch it to the back.

I write this idea down before bed.    

Monday: 

Or, to cut holes into the circles on the back and reveal the inner black batt, and then stitch around them with black thread that would show on the front side.

To use coloured silk and chance and also holes and to work from the back with out knowing how the front will be affected.

Tuesday;

We made a trip to Lively for an 11:30 appointment for new computer glasses for me. 

I let the lady there pick them out.

The metaphysics of the ordinary.  The pared down aesthetic. Nothing strident.  Well made.  

Intensely worked surface. Not hard work, but careful work. Do not know how it will turn out.

Trust that it is going to work.

My work is about comfort and about the inner world and about the cosmic mystery.

It is not a call to action.  It is a call to reflection.

sun and moon of mine, you've come.

my sight, my hearing, you've come

ecstasy, you've come

eyes filled with sun, harvest of all my longing,

you've come.

desert bandit, penance breaker, silver moon beloved

you've come

Rumi

Wednesday: 

Went to book club today.   It was well attended.  Seven people.  We all liked the book.   Girl With a Pearl Earring.  Afterwards, I went to my studio in town.

Thursday: 

Poetry is an element in all my work.  Poems not to be read, but to be seen and touched without the need to understand them.  

Poetry arises from the desire to get beyond the finite and historical (the human world of violence and difference) in order to reach something transcendent.  (Ben Lerner )

Friday:  

Poetry comes from wanting to recognize a world where everything is connected.  Poems give a sense of prayer.  (Cecilia Vicuna)

Saturday:

We went to Sudbury yesterday.  It was a busy day.  A medical appointment for Ned.  A visit to see the gallery I'll be exhibiting in this summer.  

In my new quilt, I am couching long strips of silk around large unstitched circles.  I am loving the simplicity and the feeling that working this way gives me.  It's really slow.    I am enjoying my time spent with this piece.

I feel as if I'm painting or drawing - allowing my hands to do the thinking, not my mind.

Textiles are records of the every-day.  Textiles are records of endurance.  Textiles record the care and attention given to simple things that surround us. (Dorothy Caldwell)

Some souls have blue stars.  

Some souls have echoes of a burnt voice.

Crumbs of kisses.

Sobs from trees.

Tranquil whiteness.

Flocks of Songs.  

(selected words from several of Lorca's poems that he wrote in 1920)  

making quilts

 Crown of Thorns 1972.  first quilt by Judy Martin
 re-purposed clothing and curtain fabric, hand pieced and hand quilted, 
(no longer exists)

I made my first quilt when I was twenty, and my second one when I was 24.  I've never gone to therapy like my children do.  I've made quilts instead.

self portrait, 1985
hand painted cotton, re-purposed maternity clothing, hand quilted 42 x 42 inches 

When I started having babies,  quilt making fit into my day better than any other art form.

Judy (31 years) with her two older children in 1982 

I live in Northern Ontario.  I've lived here all my life.  

The quilts I made during my 30’s and 40’s are shocking in their lack of skill.  I gave the baby quilts (learning samples) away to new parents who accepted them graciously.  

spider web baby quilt, 1983
polyester-cotton blends, machine pieced, hand quilted
this photo from 1999 when the baby was 16.  She was using it as a car blanket.

What's going on with them?  I look at the photos in this post and I could say so much about each one, but it would only be interesting for me.

They are soft objects that came together from materials I could touch, were real.

They also came from some kind of fantasy of what I hoped and dreamed and could not name.   

Skipping, 1988   fabric paint, cotton fabrics, machine pieced, hand quilted 

Quilts are slow to make.

There are a lot of repetitive tasks involved that put a person into a meditative state. 

And as I was making them, not only did I feel comforted, I also felt that here was the place I could say things that were not "normal".

About the photos in this blog post.  I spent all day yesterday writing and deleting text, but the images here have been stable.  I wanted to write about how I learned to quilt with no mentor.  

I studied fine art and received a fine art degree from Lakehead University while the kids were still little, but quilts were not part of the curriculum.    Quilts are not part of the fine art world.

Today, Yesterday, Tomorrow, 1995
hand painted clotton, overdyed cotton, machine pieced, hand quilted,
grocery list embroidered on reverse side

And the quilting world was very rigid at the time.  There were quilt police with rules and points and 12 stitches per inch.   My quilts were accepted into juried shows but they rarely won awards.  They were not understood in the quilt world. 

The quilts I made when I was actively mothering were related to my daily life as a mother and also to the fantasy I had about what quilts could be.  Even when they were finished, I maintained that fantasy and loved my own work.  I believe that making them saved my life.

We moved from Kenora to Manitoulin when the kids were 6, 8, 13, and 15 years old.  They went to school and I taught classical piano in a church basement.  

protection blanket  2005.  Chemical dyes on rayon embellished with sequins and ribbon,
machine pieced, hand quilted

In 2005, we had an empty nest.   I began this blog in 2006. 

I kept making my quilts.  I didn't know what I was doing in so many words, but I kept doing it.  

When I gathered up the few here I looked at them more critically.  They don't speak for me the way they used to but they remain evidence that I was here.     

prayer cloth: hope  2024    natural dyes on cotton, hand pieced, hand quilted with red thread 

This is a much edited post.  Thank you for continuing to read it.  

Psychic:  derived from the unconscious rather than the conscious.

Therapy:  care and attention

Making quilts:  still saving my life.

Paris

Dear blog friends,

I went to Paris last week.  

The weather was really quite mild for middle of February.  I love the avenues of bare winter trees in front of the elegant buildings.  Above is the Hotel des Invalides.

Our daughter Grace came with me.  

We figured Paris out together. 

Even in February, people sit outside to have coffee.  In the above photo, we are at the cafe attached to the famous English bookstore,  Shakespeare and Company.  We could see Notre Dame.

My friend Marjan came from The Netherlands for a day.  We have been friends for over 50 years.

The reason I went to Paris was to view the estrelas of Olga de Amaral (above).  I will soon write about Olga de Amaral's large retrospective at the Cartier foundation in Paris in Modernist Aesthetic.  

On the last day, I walked from our hotel to the Jardin du Luxembourg.  

I found a bench there and watched people walk past, children play football, elders play petanque or chess, and several sets of friends share picnics.

I had my stitching with me.  Stitching always helps me to feel at home no matter where I am, and as a bonus, it holds the time and the memories.  I will always think of Paris when I touch and see this piece.

Wish you were here.

love, Judy

Joyce Wieland: Pucker Up

There is a special exhibition at the national gallery of Canada this month about Joyce Wieland’s lipstick prints.  

Joyce Wieland (1930 - 1998) lived in New York between 1962 and 1971.  Living in the States heightened her awareness of her own Canadian identity and she became inspired her to create artwork about her love for Canada.  She said that she thought of Canada as female.  

Wieland made a series of lipstick (lip-synch) prints between 1970 and 1974  

One of her most famous is her lipstick print of Canada’s national anthem, Oh Canada.  

O Canada by Joyce Wieland, lipstick lithography on paper 1970

Wieland made the print in 1970 at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax in the new lithography workshop.  She substituted lipstick for the oil-based ink and mouthed the words to the national anthem of Canada directly onto the printing stone.  

Photos of the 40 year old artist making the O Canada print are part of the current exhibition.  

Also on display in glass cases are her working drawings.  

Joyce Wieland then created an embroidery of red lips and white teeth singing O Canada.  I wrote about it in 2008 on modernist aesthetic.  here 

She continued this series with an animated film of her embroidered lips and our national anthem.  

Image of Joyce Wieland with her embroidered O Canada
lip-synch animation (York university digital library) 

Read more about Joyce and this original work at the  Art Canada Institute.

Also on display this month at the National Gallery of Canada is the lithograph The Arctic Belongs To Itself  made in 1973. 

It is activist art, made to create awareness in the viewer of resource exploitation and indigenous rights.  Joyce Wieland used a wide variety of media including quilts and film, before the time when such a multi disciplinary practice was common.  

The Arctic Belongs to Itself
lithograph, silkscreen and etching on wove paper by Joyce Wieland, 1973 

Wieland was also ahead of her time in recognizing indigenous sovereignty.  

Fifty years after these prints were made, the president of the large and powerful country next door to Canada, the United States, is casually saying  that Canada should be the 51st state.  Our country’s most important art institution has put together this feminist’s work about national pride at this time in history and I am proud and pleased to share it here. 

To quote Joyce Wieland, “I LOVE CANADA 🇨🇦 ❤️”

Remembrance

Floating World by Linda Finn   acrylic on canvas 24 x 30 inches

This post is dedicated to the memory of Northern Ontario artist, Linda Finn.   (1945 - 2025)    obituary here

It's also about some other late artists from northern Ontario Canada, a place I have lived for over 30 years.   I feel that each of them worked very hard to support art and artists in our beautiful, spread-out community.  I’m writing this post to  sing out their names with respect.  

Linda Finn's paintings, prints and assemblages were a constant at the Perivale gallery  here on Manitoulin. I sought out her innovative work whenever I visited the gallery.  

The War Letters Project in the Art Gallery of Sudbury  
'April 1917' is on the back wall.  Screen print on bible pages, acrylic on paper , photo etching and lithographs on paper, assembled in 2007 by Linda Finn

In 2017, Linda Finn had a solo show at the  Art Gallery of Sudbury and displayed The War Letters Project. an ongoing body of work that she had begun in 2007.  The project included a wide variety of art pieces; assemblages, paintings, prints and book-works and toured to eleven Ontario galleries over a period of years.  

detail of Linda Finn's assemblage of bible pages printed with repeated images of a soldier 

Each piece in the project started from letters that Linda's grandmother Essie received from soldiers over the two world wars.  The artworks are all shown with better photos on Linda's website (here).  While there, you might be interested in the 20 minute video (The Old Tin Box) that tells the story of this project.  

Essie's letter, monoprint with chine colle on paper, 2008 (detail) by Linda Finn

Now, I want to take a moment to mention three other artists who I personally mourn.  Each of them reached out to me and made me feel part of the art community of northern Ontario when our family moved to Manitoulin from Kenora in 1993.  I looked to them as mentors, although they were only a few years older than me.  They developed their careers before the internet which means that online images of their work are rare.  I’ve provided each artist with two links however, and more information and some images can be found if you click. 

 I apologize if this post seems too personal or dark.  Death is not talked about much.  But you know, I feel that I’m not actually saying enough about these friends of mine when I consider all that they have done for Canadian art.  I’m just naming them.  

Ann Suzuki   (died 2021)   her obituary here

ear hear earth heart by Ann Beam, acrylic on paper, 24 x 30 inches

Ann Beam     (died 2024)   her website here     

Ray Laporte   (died 2022)   his obituary here

My friends.  Remembered here.   I miss them and continue to be inspired by each of them.  

Now, in the spirit of memory and joy,  may I show you the prayer cloth that I finished last night?  

Perhaps it is more of a play cloth.  The transferred painting was done by my middle daughter, Grace, when she was five years old.  She painted the mermaid and the merman on paper which I then transferred with a hot iron to polyester fabric. I was teaching this kind of art in the schools at the time and we used the technique at home for birthday party t-shirt-making and the like.  The heart at the bottom was painted just once, then ironed three times onto the cloth, each time getting a little fainter.  I will be seeing Grace this weekend and will give her the quilt.  I think that the twins can use it for their dolls.  

Mermaid Quilt by Judy Martin,
heat transfer on polyester, dyed velvet, hand stitched, 28 x 33.5 inches  2025,
original painting by Grace Martin when she was five years old

another prayer cloth

I made a small quilt this month.  I'm calling it dream cloth.  

The name comes from Paul Klee's quote about imagination that is pinned on my studio wall.       

                "I dream and my soul awakens. Imagination is the star."       Paul Klee

The red Japanese Azumino cotton and the pink linen have been in my stash for a couple of years.  Putting them together in this piece was an impulsive decision.  I didn't think about it.  I reacted to the two colours together with my heart.         

Hand pieced and then hand quilted. 

I used big thread (pearl cotton) to quilt the star and regular hand quilting thread (black) from YIL to quilt the welsh circles and leaves in the surround.   

I've been wanting to try this type of quilting for a long time.    

You can see the design more clearly from the back of the quilt.  (silk fabric) (wool batt)   

I was glad to have it in the car when we went to Toronto to visit family in the middle of the month.  

The piece above is by Canadian artist, Anna Wagner Ott.  

It's the same colour as my dream cloth yet with an open heart shape. She called it Loving Red. 

I've admired Anna's work for a long time and am so glad to have been able to see one of her piece in real life at the World of Threads festival last fall.   

Anna Wagner Ott died in her sleep on Christmas night.  It was a sudden, unexpected death that shocked the textile community.  I feel as if I knew her, and although we did not meet, I am so sad that we are no longer able to be inspired by her constant making.  In 2022, Anna was interviewed by  fibre arts take two .  A tender obituary written by her daughters is on instagram, view it here.   

I like January because it seems empty after the bustle of the fall and then the holidays. This January seemed especially empty for me though and I was glad to have a solid, small quilt to complete. 

bundle of old sweaters

Veiled by Anna Wagner-Ott