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

Marking Time with Fabric and Thread is published

There is a new book published this fall written by the American tapestry artist, Tommye McClure Scanlin.  The title is: Marking Time with Fabric and Thread: Calendars, Diaries, and Journals within your Fiber Craft.   

Judy Martin's stitched journal, Not to Know But To Go On, is one of the thirty diaries or journals featured.  

Judith E Martin lives and works on Manitoulin Island in Lake Huron.  She holds two BA degrees in fine art, from Lakehead University, Thunder Bay Ontario (1993) and Middlesex University, London, UK (2012).  She made her first quilt at the age of 20 , and in the 1990's she made hand-stitched story quilts using the poetic code she discovered in traditional quilt patterns and world embroidery.  Her work has been widely exhibited across Canada as well as internationally.  Judith's stitched artwork was featured in the book Slow Stitch: Mindful and Contemplative Textile Art by Claire Wellesley-Smith (2015) and is supported by the Ontario Arts Council.   

'I have kept journals since the mid-1980's when I was in my 30s.  Most of them are black hard-covered 8 and half by 11inch sketchbooks.  I continue to write down my ideas, record family events and stories, collect inspirational images, and make sketches of the work I want to make.  I have let my children draw in them over the years when they were bored, and now I encourage my grandchildren to draw in them with me when we visit.  I use a ballpoint pen for nearly everything."

"In 2010, I was inspired to create a stitched journal to record every day of the years before, during, and after my 60th birthday.  I began it on my birthday, July 10, 2010, and continued until July 10, 2013.  The project gathered up three years of time.  I was not interested in trying to represent what I did during each of the days or even what the weather was  I was just interested in the whirl of time and how fast it goes by and how beautiful life is."

"The process was to couch strips of fabric from  my stash of saved cloth onto artist canvas with a complete skein of cotton embroidery floss for each day.  Every day I would select a new skein and use it all up. the days are thus marked by bands of coloured thread, and are clearly differentiated on the back of the creaem-coloured canvas.  The cloth I chose was also used up, although it was never measured.  I used this project as a way to go through my fabric collection.  I discarded or gave away cloth I no longer cared about, and used only fabrics that had meaning or beauty for me in this project.

About the thread: Although I kept a wide variety of colours of embroidery floss on hand I did not look at them like I did the cloth. When it came time to choose one, I put my hand in the basket without looking and used whatever one came out, because we do not know what the day will bring, do we?  This idea of chance, of not knowing but continuing, changed the textile from a journal of days to a philosophical poem.  I worked with pieces of canvas approximately 13 x 22 inches until they were filled up, then attached them in order with a wide cotton tape.  I also embroidered the date of each panel on the back."  

The result of my three years of daily practice is a long strip of stitched cloth that resembles a Finnish rag rug, 220 feet long and 13 inches wide.  Its title, Not To Know But To Go On, comes from Agnes Martin's ideas that I found in the book of her collected writings published in 1992 by Hatje Cantz.

page 58 and 59

In the above photo of page 58 and 59 of Marking Time With Fabric and Thread are pictured Judith E Martin's mixed  media fabric construction, Not to Know But To Go On 2010 - 2013, 73 yards by 13 inches by 1.2 inch.  The photo on page 58 is of this piece installed in World of Threads Festival in 2014 is by Gareth Bate, curator of the festival.  The photo on page 59 is of the journal laid out in a forest path and was taken by the artist.   

There is a editorial press release of this new book on the publisher's website:  Schiffer publishing .

30 artists were profiled in the book: Besides Judith E Martin, the list includes Janet Austin, Ayesha Barlas, Kate Colwell, Geri Forkner, Rowen Haug, Natasha Khiev, Kay Lawrence, Mary Jane Lord, Kalliopi Monoyios, Heidi Parkes, Ellen Schiffman, Clare Danek, Jennifer Edwards, Emma Freeman, Jennifer McGregor, Rebecca Mezoff, Karen Turner, Val Vaganek, Carol Ward, Rebecca Cartwright, Jess Jones, Robin Lynde, Joan Sheldon, The Tempestry Project, Susan Martin Maffei, Michael Rohde,  Karen Schaller, and the author Tommye Scanlin.  

This book is available in book stores  now.  

Ontario Arts Council Exhibition Assistance Grant

Announcement:  Judy Martin was awarded an Ontario Arts Council Exhibition Assistance Grant

The grant will help cover the return shipping costs for her body of sculptural work from Annapolis Royal Nova Scotia to Manitoulin Island Ontario.   The two person exhibition with Penny Berens and Judy Martin curated by Miranda Bouchard was entitled In the Middle of the World.  It was exhibited three times, twice in Ontario (Almonte and Kenora) and once in Nova Scotia.  The Nova Scotia show ran from September 7 until October 26, 2024.

The artist wishes to acknowledge and thank the OAC for the continued support of her work.

 

Quilts=Art=Quilts November 2 2024- January 5 2025

Far Away Stars

Quilts = Art = Quilts 2024 

November 2, 2024  -  January 5, 2025   Schweinfurth Art Centre, Auburn New York

Jurors:  Dorothy Caldwell and Michael James.  Dorothy Caldwell will speak at 3 pm on the opening day.  Click on the above link to read the names of the 53 quilt artists in this year's exhibition.

Judy Martin's two-sided textile, Far Away Stars / Cloudy Day will be there!  

Cloudy Day