Judy Martin will present an artist talk at the Contemporary Textile Studio Workshop in Toronto

 

Touch is the Mother:  A Quilt Trunk Show with Judy Martin

Saturday July 25m 2026.  Attendance is limited.

2 - 4 pm at the Contemporary TExtile Studio Workshop suite 109 401 Richmond St West. Toronto

The talk will begin with a digital introduction to Judy's practice, follower by an opportunity to view and touch several of Judy's hand stitched quilts and books.    

4-5 pm - a casual walk through of the exhibition at Craft Ontario gallery in suite 108, 401 Richmond.  Both April and Judy Martin will be the guides.  Earlier and Later:  New Quilts by April Martin and  Judy Martin  

July 25 is the final day for this mother-daughter exhibition.

Earlier and Later: Talk is June 20, 2 pm

 

The event is free, but they would like people to rsvp.  

Here is a link to do so.  Reserve a Spot.  

The gallery is at 401 Richmond Street West, in Toronto.  xo

Beyond The Sky

 Today, August 23 at 1 pm, Judy Martin will be interviewed by Sophie Anne Edwards.  The conversation will be recorded and will be made available on Martin’s blog soon.  

Material Poetry: a presentation for the Puyallup Quilt Guild

manitowaning bay in the morning 

The strongest inspiration is my daily view of sky and water. 

prayer to the sky a 2020

I hand stitch all my quilts.  It is my favourite part.   

I use both sides of my quilts. 

prayer to the sky b 2020 

lamentation 2022

Entirely hand stitched, even the small squares in this green quilt were sewn by hand.  The red circles were hand embroidered into the piece after the quilting was finished.  

the good and the true 2022

My style has evolved over the 50 years I've been making quilts. 

Newer pieces have a feeling of empty space.  

dear earth 2018

Circles, spirals, crosses, and dots are human marks, understood by everyone, a common language from all cultures around the globe and through time from pre-history to the present.  

help me to balance 2018

I often use old domestic textiles such as flannel sheets, tablecloths, and wool blankets.  And red thread.  I use red thread a lot.   

inner world 2022

inner inner world  2022

You will also notice a horizon in most of my pieces.  

On May 1, 2024 Judy Martin was the guest speaker for the Puyallup Quilt guild in Washington state, USA.  She showed her recent work in quilts.  

"Turning Forever To The Heart" artist lecture for The Club

Rue  Pigalle is an organization founded by Isabelle Fish from Ontario, Canada that studies and supports fine craft.  Isabelle invited Judy to speak about her work to The Club at their December 1 meeting.  Excerpts from Judy's screen-share zoom presentation are in this post.  It was a good opportunity for Martin to reflect on her long career as a quilt maker.  She spoke about how the process of making quilts has helped her understand and cope with her own story. To watch the 40 minute zoom presentation, please click here and click on the youtube link.

Order belies chaos (1990):  Ned and I married and started our life together in Thunder Bay on a large rural property.  He loved northern Ontario, and although I initially thought he would take me with him back to Toronto where he was born, it turned out that this was never his plan.   Now in retrospect, I am glad that I’ve spent my whole life in northern Ontario.  The isolation, ruggedness, and the innocence of Northern Ontario, has informed my art.  In this log cabin quilt, the sun and the moon are depicted in the sky at the same time.  When that happens, it is called a cosmic marriage.  I made this piece in 1990, married by that time for 17 years and still figuring out what being married means.    

By the way, the quilts in this post were photographed by Nick Dubecki in Sudbury, Ontario.  Pieces that had been given away or sold were borrowed back so that they could be professionally photographed in digital format for purposes just like this talk, or perhaps for a memoir some day.

the future is not ours to see 1988:   We started our family in 1978, and the beauty of the children playing in sunlight amazed me.  I responded with watercolour paintings.  When we moved from Thunder Bay to Kenora in 1982, the four beaches of the Lake of the Woods and weekends of family boat camping provided me with much subject matter.  I photographed the kids playing near the water and painted them at night while they slept.  The paintings were popular and nearly everything I painted sold.  In the above quilt, there are four acrylic on cotton paintings of our 3rd child removing her sunbonnet, and if you read through the appliqued alphabet letter by letter beginning with A B C, you will discover that the future is not ours to see.

thunder and lighting 1989: Another log cabin quilt with its light and dark halves of the blocks organized into the 'streak of lightening' arrangement.  I studied the language of quilt making and learned the code.  I learned that fertility, protection, or celebration are major themes for bed quilts.  That connection to the bed, a charged and intimate place where love, sex, illness, death, and dream happen, is a metaphor that makes quilts a powerful medium for artists/poets.   I named this quilt Thunder and Lightning because in order to have a good storm, you need to have both of those things, and in order to have a good creative object, you need to have both art and craft.  In the centre of the quilt is a painting with two lines of embroidered text.  

Art is the Expression of Being, Craft is the Expression of Knowledge".  (Ted Goodden)    

counting my blessings 1999:  I made many quilts during the years of child bearing and full-time parenting and each one of them was a story or a poem.  I look back on them now and feel like how I imagine the German painter Kathe Kollwitz did when she said:   ‘no longer diverted by other emotions I work as the way a cow grazes and yet formerly, in my so wretchedly limited working time, I was more productive because I was more sensual.”   I can't make these kinds of quilts now even though I have more time.  They are so full of intimacy.  They, and the baby paintings, were directly connected to my daily experience at that time in my life. The black border of Counting my Blessings is velvet with embroidery.  The central panel is like a Child's counting book.  I have four children and they are my blessings.  

mended world 2012:  My work has become more abstract and universal.  I use the archetypal shapes of circle, spiral, cross and dot as my language now, marks identified by Carl Jung as the First Shapes that humanity has understood for centuries around the world.  This 90 inch square quilt is one of the four panels that I made with my local community in The Manitoulin Circle Project.  We met every Thursday over four years, all the fabrics (mostly linen table cloths) and all the time was donated.  

basic goodness 2017:  I want my work to be like the sky.  When I look at the sky, something happens inside me that is beyond intellect.  I go into a reverie, where I am not really thinking, but am receptive to insights.  Or memories.  Or decisions. And rarely, but occasionally, wonder.  These are existential conditions.  My work is about opening into our inner world. 

Soft Summer Gone 2016:  The silk fabrics in this quilt were coloured with natural dyes from wild plants foraged near where I live.  The quilting is hand embroidery.  It is in the permanent collection of the International Quilt Museum in Nebraska.  

Indigo celebration 2023:    I want my work to help others to enter their inner worlds.  Our bodies are fragile.  Our spirit is vast.  Each day of our lives is different.  We don't know.  the future is not ours to see.  Sometimes there is thin ice to navigate, sometimes there is the edge of a cliff to see across but not fall over, sometimes there is the banality of every day. 

Indigo Celebration took me nine years to make.  Entirely hand pieced from one inch squares, it accompanied me when I travelled with my husband or alone on planes or in vehicles.  I could put the thread and fabrics into a baggie.  The ordinary magic and labour / time / simplicity of this quilt is a metaphor for being alive.  

Judy's youtube presentation can be accessed through Rue Pigalle's blog.  HERE  

Earthiness and Ethereality in Conversation: An Artist Talk

In The Middle of The World closes December 18, 2021 after a three month run. (Oct 2 - Dec 18)

The exhibition was very well received with many 'in real life' visitors.  Judy Martin, Penny Berens and Miranda Bouchard wish to thank the Mississippi Valley Textile Museum in Almonte, Ontario Canada.

The show was beautifully installed in one of the most unique gallery spaces in Canada.  

There will be an online zoom event at 2 pm December 18.  The link to pre-register is here.

Miranda Bouchard joined up with Judy Martin and Penny Berens in 2016 with the idea of creating an exhibition of new work by these two senior artists that would dig into their personal belief systems and express the deep connection each feels with their individual rural environments.  Judy is from Northern Ontario and Penny is from Nova Scotia.  

The artists wanted to be free to seek and explore new directions yet have a support system that kept them on track.  Miranda ,with her natural depth of understanding combined with her experience in art management and curatorial work was able to provide that kind of support.  

Miranda will lead the conversation during this zoom event, just as she has led the many conversations the three have had through online meetings and emails and face to face studio visits over the last five years.  The two artists approach their work from different slants.  

Judy's work is more meditative than descriptive.

She gets brave by looking at other fine artists' work and lives.

She believes that art made from cloth has power.

Cloth is familiar and our bodies understand it at a deep level.  

Time and timelessness combine in her work, and the marks she makes are evidence of lived time.

Her work is about the huge topic of being human.  She talks about the inner world a lot. 

Penny loves nature.  

Penny walks every day in nature with her dogs and observes it closely.

She works in solitude and allows her work to change as it goes along, but the basis remains her experience of living in a rural environment.

Her work is meditative and brave.  "No matter how you think about it" she says "you're completely exposing yourself in your work."

Over the years, Miranda has become quite familiar with the two artists and sees differences and similarities in their work.  She brought organization to the conversations and often used categories to clarify things.  

inner / outer /in between  

touch changes / heart changes / time changes

change  / open / share 

heart / head / hands

Miranda will lead the conversation on Saturday.  She has promised to ask some stimulating questions.  

Here are two examples: 

Q:  What keeps you curious?

Q:  Where does vulnerability show up in this exhibition?

These kinds of questions open up ideas and it will be interesting to hear what we say.  It will not be scripted.    The gallery has promised to record the conversation and share it with people who have registered, so that if you can not make the exact 2 pm date in this busy pre-Christmas time, I encourage you to still register and watch it later.    Here is the link again. 

https://mvtm.ca/mvt2/event-page/middle-of-the-world/

There will also be a live Q and A with those who attend.

All photos in this post are by Paul Latour except for the 4th and 5th ones (Judy Martin)

Artist Talk for In The middle of the World

eternity

a cliff of wool blanket, wool cloth, natural dyes and hand stitch

the forever

a cliff of wool blanket, wool and velvet fabrics, wool yarn and hand stitch

There will be an artist talk with Miranda Bouchard curator, Penny Berens and Judy Martin about their exhibition In The Middle of the World will be live on September 29, 2021 at 7 pm.

Here is the link to register.  Limit of 90 participants.

 

Videos from rhe Elemental Festival in Kagawong

This just in:   A video put out by the Woodland Sisters, Caitlin and Cassidy Mcauliffe.  One of their partner's made it while the duo were in Kagawong at the end of September during the 2nd annual Elemental festival.  The video follows the two girls as they enjoy the rural atmosphere of Manitoulin and the Kagawong River complete with spawning salmon and Bridal Veil Falls.  Their video is up on youtube now.  It's a minute and a half.  It is necessary to click on the words Elemental Festival after it starts to play to see the full images.



(There is a tiny glimpse of Judy speaking in the above video) x

The sisters also sent some additional footage of Judy speaking about her daily walk.  36 seconds can be viewed  here.  (this clip is not on you tube)

To read the complete text of the artist talk, go to this link.  Sewing Myself To This Place

walk and talk elemental festival

Judy Martin presented her metaphysical talk to appreciative gatherings on both days of the festival.   Afterwards, many attempted to match her slow gait along the river walk in Kagawong, Manitoulin Island Ontario Canada.

Elemental Festival 2
Manitoulin Island Canada
October 1  (4:45 pm and October 2 (1 pm) 2016
What follows is almost the complete text of her talk.

My daily outdoor walk is a rhythm, a routine, a line of steps.  My foot steps are like stitches.  I am sewing myself to this place.  I am connecting to my rural area and my life here on Manitoulin.  To turn this into an art project, I began to mark each walk by moving a square of white cloth into a basket.  My walk is 1 km to Cricket Hill and 1 km back home again.  1 km is 1250 steps.

Big projects attract me.  I like to be absorbed in a piece for years, allowing it to be part of my daily routine.  I am making a 1 km path with marks like running stitches that represents my footprint and my gait. 

On May 3, I was unable to do my walk as my left leg developed so much pain.

On May 19 I began to sew instead of walk, using up fabrics that I have collected and saved over my life time to sew 1 km of patchwork.  I thought that this will be a fabric piece about my daily walk but also about my sewing practice and used a chain stitch method to create half square triangles.  I began to love admire the strong chains that were coming forth and sewed every day rather than walked every day with cloth I have collected for 40 years. Each piece of cloth has its own story. (father’s hospita gown , silk from commission etc)

The cloth seemed like a luminous halo that represented my life.  My walking piece was morphing into a life path.  Virginia Woolf said:   Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.

This project became less about my daily walk on Manitoulin and more about an accumulation of moments of life itself. A long orderly path of cloth purchased for projects, some made, some not.  A life of stepping over and through hurdles and burdens, joys and unexpected visions.  My leg kept me from doing the walk on the road, but not from sewing the road.  The path I was piecing had to do with mortality and summing up and about stitching my Self together. 

I couldn’t bear weight on my left leg to make the steps but I could sew a soft cloth path that was giving me strength.  Van Gogh said that colour has power over line.  Line may be the language of reason but colour is sensuality itself. Making a path of memory and colour with the sewing machine’s walking foot, resting my painful leg. A path that shows how it FEELS to be alive.  

On May 31 Ned bought me a cane.  

On June 5 the leg broke.

My left femur just broke with spontaneous spiral fracture.  A clean break, it was mended with surgery with a titanium nail from hip to knee, inserted into the bone marrow so that the bone would grow around it.

I needed to heal.  A way I have used to self-heal in past was to make bundles.  When my mother was dying, I started to wrap things and found the action of wrapping very therapeutic.  The gesture created a real material object, but the motion of it took me beyond it. The slowness, the time, the touching, the moving arm gesture, Touch is the mother of the senses. I started to use those white squares and wrap the white sweet clover that grows on our beach in July  It grows as tall as a human and smells very sweet.  My husband would bring me up a tall stalk that I would then break and bend to make them small enough to fit within the white squares.  I thought, here are the foot- steps of my path.

It was my daughter who said they looked like bones.  

The walking piece had morphed again.  I am using the chain sritched luminous halo cloth triangle-squares to space the foot-steps / broken bones  / running stitches together in a long line, not 1 km yet, but getting there.   This project shows faith in the future and faith in myself.

Working with materials reveals me to myself.  I understand my life and healing through making. Eastern cultures believe that the act of joining small pieces together embodies a wish for a long life. Physical and spiritual are combined in my path.  The bone wrappings might represent the body, but they also yield a mystery.  What is inside?  What is inside that wrapping we wonder.   Is it the spirit?

The chains of half square triangles, dark and light, red and black, old clothing and new velvet are sewn together only to be eventually split apart.  When split, they show that they indeed joined.   When strung together they make a strong chain and give space for the body-mystery to move along.

Step step step.  My body – spirit steps into the future.  Over and over and over, every day, every day , every day.  The birds and the clouds in the sky, the ground beneath my feet, the ditches that change through the seasons, the neighbours that I smile greetings at, we all move along it. 

I use my cane now.  I do my shortened daily walk, moving through pain.  Not thinking but moving.  Just being.  This piece is not narrative.  It is essentialist.  It is about being.

As you walk this path, go slowly.  Match my gait.  Stay one metre away from the person in front of you and notice your own experience of walking along this river.  

the Lucky Protection exhibition

How does this exhibition fit within the art world?  Why is it cloth and thread?  What are the things that only thread and cloth can do?

Cloth is fluid.  The blanket piece above covers an unwieldy display area.  The  fluidity of the cloth softens the hard edges in this white room.

The distress that this fabric has undergone over its long life is evident.  Probably it dates from the 20's - the laundry tag places it at an address that Ned's grandparents lived in during the 1930's.   This cloth is at least 90 years old.  My father is 90 years old.  

The moon is a measure of time.  Thread is like time, it stretches.
It is human nature to stop and gaze at a full moon.  No matter how many times we see it, the moon is always wonderful, always a miracle, floating there in the huge sky.  We stare at it.  We go into ourselves.
I think of the constancy of the moon and of women from earlier times looking at the full moon with the same emotional response that I have.  With the same reverence.

 

"this is not art" we tell ourselves.  The brain tries to tell the heart, but the heart doesn't listen.
The heart responds with ancient memories of cloth.  Of being wrapped as a new baby, of pulling a sweater over our heads, of doing up buttons on a wool coat.

 Thread can draw a line with all the freedom of a pencil, but with more intent because it is so slow.  Stitch by stitch to make these marks.  SEcond after second.  Minutes, hours, days, weeks.  All that time is caught with the threads.

 I am trying to give reverence to what has gone before, by connecting recycled hand touched textiles to the present day.  I use my hands to do this.

 I've been making sewn art for so long, that I forget that there are some people out there who are prejudiced against sewing.  I am surprised.

 With this exhibition, I am defending sewing.  Sewing is art.

Hey Jude, Remember to let it under your skin, then you'll begin to make it better.  (Paul McCartney)

All images are of original sewn art by Judy Martin, on display in the exhibition entitled Lucky Protection that is the featured art display at Artists on Elgin, 168 Elgin Street, Sudbury, Ontario for the month of February 2014. 705 674 0415

The text is from the artist's talk on February 1.
The gallery made a video that documents the entire exhibit.