The two wool bundles from In the Middle of the World return to private collection

Her Arms Wrapped Round and My Heart,
 bundles of broken branches wrapped with dyed wool hanging in front of
Underfoot the Earth Divine, Judy's dyed linen and wool quilt.   
As they were installed in Artsplace, Annapolis Royal Nova Scotia, September 2024

These two wool bundles entered private collection in 2021 after the collector visited In the Middle of the World when the exhibition was installed at The Mississippi Valley Textile Museum, Almonte, Ontario.  In The Middle of the World is a two part exhibition of stitched art by Judy Martin and Penny Berens.  (curator Miranda Bouchard). The bundles are an important part of the show.   . 

My Heart with The Forever at the World of Threads, Oakville Ontario, October 2023

The exhibition went on tour in Canada during 2023 and 2024 and the collector kindly loaned the pieces back to the artist for this period of time..  

Her Arms Wrapped Round with Eternity at the World of Threads Festival, Oakville Ontario in 2023

The two bundles installed in the Douglas Family Art Centre, Kenora , May 2023
background is Penny Berens' Waiting Between Night and Day, hand stitched linen

Now the tour is over and the bundles are being returned to the collector who lives in Quebec.

Judy is full of gratitude.  

The titles of the two bundles come from this poem by WB Yeats.

When my arms wrap you round I press

My heart upon the loveliness

That is long faded from the world

W B Yeats  

The Renewal exhibition travels to Kenora

Poet in Love 
An old whole cloth quilt, silk velvet, chemical dyes, rayon, silk, natural dyes,
wool prepared for felting, silk applique thread, cotton quilting thread
layering, patching, dyeing, mending, hand quilting, wet felting
by Judy Martin, 2022, Ontario

The edges of this quilt were worn, so I covered them with white velvet.

The back was in tatters and the batting had fallen out so I layered new wool and pre-felt first, and then a new backing of naturally dyed silk and rayon.

The blue thread in the original heart-shaped design was still strong so I followed it with new quilting stitches.

Renewed with brightly coloured velvet patches and welt felting, the old quilt is now greener than grass but at the same time it is wrecked.  

Like a poet in love.            exhibition catalogue p 46 - 47

Shroud
Recycled bed sheets on a found canvas frame, macrame yarn,
 off-loom weaving, layering
by Anna Wagner-Ott (1948 - 2024)
in 2023, Ontario

In renewal of self relating to the delicate balance of vulnerability and resilience, my art mirrors a return to the raw, conflicted human condition, born from personal experiences and emotions.  

Through colour, texture and form, my work visually articulates the rich tapestry of the human experience, crafting a narrative of my emotions and existence.    exhibition catalogue page 72-73

Renewal, SAQA Canadian Regional Exhibition, opened in Kenora at the Lake of the Woods Museum (the Muse) on January 23 and will continue on display until March 22, 2025.

There is a beautiful catalogue available with an essay by juror David Kaye.  If you can't visit the show in person, perhaps you might like to purchase the catalogue.  Shall post a link.    

Two quilts enter private collections in the USA

Lake  

Linen, silk, wool and shibori back, indigo dyed, hand embroidered, hand quilted  66 x 52 inches, 2014

Turning the Air to Cloth  

cotton, linen, silk, cotton threads, chemical dye,  hand embroidery quilted, 81 x 40 inches  2015

Above Us

silk, cotton, cotton threads, chemical dye, hand embroidery-quilted, 81 x 40 inches 2015

Both quilts entered private collections in January 2025.   Lake went to Colorado, Turning The Air to Cloth went to Massachusetts.  Showing the two sides of each quilt.  

With gratitude to those who support Judy's work by purchasing it.  

Gladstone House Award

 Tomorrow is Another Day by Judy Martin is now hanging in one of the 3rd floor guest rooms at the Gladstone House Hotel, 1214 Queen Street West, Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

This textile will be on display until November 2025.   Martin won the 2024 Gladstone House award through the Ontario Craft Council.  There was an award ceremony on October 30.  The award is$1000 plus an exhibition for one year in one of the guestrooms.  All of the Gladstone House guestrooms have original art in them.

Thank you to the Gladstone House hotel for this award.

If you are interested to see this piece close up, you can request to stay in room 309 through the front desk.  I think it is a king bed.   

Our daughter April has art hanging in room 307!  See her work on my modernist aesthetic blog.

Sacred Ground will show in Quilt Con 25

detail of Sacred Ground

Sacred Ground has been selected for exhibition in Quilt Con in Phoenix Arizona in  February 2025.

There will be 460 modern quilts on display at this annual conference of the Modern Quilt Guild.

Sacred Ground is 193 x 95 cm, made from wool dyed from local Manitoulin Island plants, backed with red silk, and hand embroidery quilted with cotton and silk threads.  2024.

World of Threads "Now For Something Different" newsletter features Judy Martin's large installation about TIME.

Installation view of Northern Ontario /Time
by Judith E Martin, World of Threads Festival 2023

The October 31 edition of the World of Threads Festival newsletter includes this article about the large installation  by Judy Martin.  Dawne Rudman, co-curator of the festival, invited Martin to write more about the installation and so the text is by the artist.  The photos are by the other co-curator Gareth Bate unless otherwise noted.  

The Forever

The larger wool pieces are inspired by the rock cuts that form corridors along the highways through the Canadian Shield of Northern Ontario, a beautiful place where I have lived my entire life.  

Hanging and spinning within this landscape are vulnerable pods and human-scale cloaks.

Eternity

Made from old blankets, velvet, and hand stitch, the titles reference TIME, the most important material that I employ.  

Like many artists, the aim of my work is to communicate in a poetic way.   I want to help you to connect with your inner world.   (Judith E Martin)

The next photos show volunteers and the curators of the World of Thread festival working together to install this large and heavy installation over a period of several days in early October 2023. 

There are eight components in this installation, and almost all of them have gone on quite a creative journey to appear as they did at the World of Threads Festival in 2023.  The two largest elements are Eternity ( the colourful one) and The Forever (the grey one).

The idea to create a rock cut from old wool blankets occured to me around 2014.  I began with Eternity, but before it was all the way finished, I started The Forever.  They premiered along with the other components at the Mississippi Valley Textile Museum in Almonte, Ontario, in 2021 as part of "In the MIddle of the World, a two person exhibition with Penny Berens, curated by Miranda Bouchard.  In this installation, both rock cuts hung vertically and need to pool onto the floor.  The cloak sculptures were spread out around the gallery.

installing Eternity

The work later showed at the Lake of the Woods Museum's new gallery addition in Kenora, Ontario.  This gallery had an angled ceiling that went as high as 25 feet.  Because of this ceiling height, I was able to have Eternity hang vertically without touching the floor.  It was a good opportunity to change the orientation of The Forever from vertical to horizontal and be closer to my original 2014 sketch.  

Installing The Forever

I studied other hanging sculptures such as the Abakans by Polish artist Magdalena Abakanowicz in order to figure out how to distribute the weight and incorporate a curve with an articulated hanging device.  I wanted my piece to curve like one of the massive rock cuts along highway 69/400.   In the Middle of the World was displayed in Kenora from April until July  2023.

Installing The Forever  (photo Dawne Rudman)

In the fall of 2024, In the Middle of the World toured to Artsplace gallery in Annapolis Royal, Nova Scotia.  This is a small white cube of a gallery and we chose to edit out The Forever, because it was so immense and the gallery did not have a lift.  I was able now to turn Eternity on its side and created a new curvy articulated hanging device to suit the smaller white cube of the Nova Scotia gallery.

Still installing The Forever, World of Threads Festival 2023

Now my dream is to hang both the rock cuts together in their horizontal and curvy way.  Curving and hanging without touching the floor in a nesting arrangement is the best reflection of my initial 2014 sketches.  

Nearly done with the installation of The Forever

Each piece was very labour intensive and took many hours.  I did it during the pandemic.  

installing the time present and the time future cloaks 
 (photo Dawne Rudman)

Time Future: Touch the Stars is a very heavy velvet cocoon.  It began as a long length of commercially embroidered linen that I sewed strips of naturally dyed velvet to.   The sensual experience of touching that tucked velvet put me into a dream world, hence the title.  I also love the lining of this cloak, a very soft silk satin that was block printed in India with a dot grid.

time present: the softness inside her

Time Present: The Softness Inside Her began as a heavily stitched wall piece made from wool that I dyed with onion skins.  I thought it was completed in 2020 and put images of it on my website.  An offer to purchase it came from the states in 2021, but by then, I had already transformed it into the cloak you see here.  

installing the two wool bundles

Her Arms Wrapped Round and My Heart are two bundles that hang like pupae.  It is what is inside them that is important to me.  (The footprints from my installation of footprints made from broken branches and fabric that were placed alongside the Kagawong river during the Elemental Festival on Manitoulin Island and were meant to represent my daily walk).

my heart and her arms wrapped round,
bundles of branches wrapped with wool

These two bundles went into a private collection and I am grateful to the owner who has loaned them to me for exhibitions.  The title for the two pieces comes from W.B. Yeats:

when my arms wrap you round I press

 my heart upon the loveliness,

 that has long faded from the world

Artist Judith E Martin
 at the opening of the World of Threads Festival in 2023  
photo:  Albert Fuchigami

Time Past: Island Heart

Time Past: Island Heart is a bed quilt (2020) that I hung from a padded wooden device. The quilt has been laundered many times, is very soft and visitors are encouraged to touch it.  Please touch it.

Flowers Bloomed

Flowers Bloomed went through a lot of steps before it  became the cloak it is today.  I used to call it Flowers Started Blooming Inside Me because it was such an intimate piece.  It was a self portrait of my inner world.  Now it is a self portrait of softness.

A highlight for me was having the video made by Gareth Bate that included K.D. Lang's rendition of Helpless.  available on Instagram, click here. 

The World of Threads newsletter is free and is sent by email every two weeks. To subscribe, go to the World of Threads website, here.  

Softer and Dreamier is featured in Arnold’s Attic

 

Arnold's Attic is an online publication by Catherine Hill from Lancashire in the United Kingdom that includes a you tube channel, an instagram feed and a blog.  The focus is textiles.  Catherine's featured artist for November 2024 is Judy Martin's Softer and Dreamier exhibition, Festival of Quilts 2024.  

Judy Martin with Snowy,
 a distorted wool log cabin quilt 153 x 153 x 8 cm  or 60 inches square

It was a live interview during a busy day at the festival.  Catherine asked Judy to speak about some of the pieces on display.  She speaks about some of the more private meanings and moments that happened to her and to the work during the process of making it.  

Here is the link to the Arnolds Attic blog.

Here is the link to the Arnolds Attic youtube channel video.  

Thank you Catherine for this attention.  Much appreciated.

detail of Intimacy during the Festival of Quilts exhibition, August 2024