The talk: My Awakened Heart / My Pandemic Summer

 Judy Martin was the guest speaker for York Heritage Quilt Guild in Toronto, October 20, 2020.

The meeting was held over Zoom, and the lecture was pre-recorded.  

It has now become available online and can be viewed by clicking HERE. 

It's 45 minutes long, and throughout Judy speaks about how making is healing.  She shows the projects that she worked on between March and September of 2020.  Near the end of the recording, she shows some of her more recent finished pieces.  

My Awakened Heart (My Pandemic Summer) lecture for York Heritage Quilt Guild in Toronto

 

Judy Martin was invited by guild member, Irena Hopper, to speak to the York Heritage Quilters Guild at their October meeting in Toronto.  Because of COVID, all meetings are online and Judy created a pre-recorded presentation with the assistance of Deb Larsen, a member of the guild.    The lecture goes live tonight October 20 at 7 pm, and will be available for members of the guild and for guests.  Facebook link here

Judy's lecture is not the typical trunk show about her life's work and the story behind it, but rather an exploration of how her quilting and stitching practice helped her emotionally during the strangest spring and summer of  our lives, the 2020 pandemic.  She will show where she lives and explain how she works.  There will also be a gallery of new work, not shown in public yet. 

SAQA virtual conference March 19-21

Thank you and congratulations to Studio Art Quilts Association for organizing the virtual conference and giving us the ability to share our project with the membership during this surreal and frightening time.
It is a pleasure for me to be able to speak to you today about the exciting experience of collaborating on an exhibition with Penny and Miranda.
In my part of our presentation, I will share how my work has changed over time and discuss what I hope to express in my work now.

My work for this exhibition is an exploration of our vast inner world.
I feel that it is my truest work, very simple and abtract.
Until I was 60, myt art quilts were visual stories about my family.
My husband and I (he's on the ladder in the photo) have four children, now grown up.
I was an exhibiting artist for their entire lives....


This is the beginning of the presentation 'handwork, homework and heartwork' that was viewed live on Friday March 20 at 2:30 pm Eastern Daylight Time.  Judy Martin and co-presenters Miranda Bouchard (emerging curator) and Penny Berens (nova scotia artist-colleague) about their upcoming exhibition "In The Middle Of The World"
The presentation was recorded along with the other wonderful presentations at the conference and will be available to the membership who paid their conference fee until the end of June.  This conference entitled Mosaiqa was supposed to be held in Toronto Canada but was changed to a virtual conference because of the world pandemic that is threatening us all globally.

Congratulations to the conference committee (Maggie Vanderweit and team) and to SAQA staff and board members who came together to successfuly produce this innovative solution.  

Lecture for Canadian Embroiders' Guild, London 45th anniversary celebration

In 2006 I went back to school for a degree in embroidery.  I went through OPUS, run by the well-known Julia Caprara, and completed that degree from Middlesex in 2012.  This is my graduate piece, 100 inches square made from wool –silk blend fabric that I dyed with local plants and hand stitched.

Even though I now hold a university degree in embroidery, I feel as if I’m self-taught.  So much of what I do, I just figure it out.  I look at samples and books and online, I look at paintings and installations, I read, I take walks outside, and then I plunge in fearlessly.   I plunge.

I’m reading Marion Milner’s famous book “On Not Being Able To Paint” at the moment and on page 117 she wrote:    “If the sun and moon should doubt, they’d immediately go out”

She uses this rhyme to illustrate the doubt that debilitates creativity.  How so often we do nothing because we are afraid for the badness of our effort.  We become unable to draw because we are not able to see ahead.  We rely on patterns.    

In the workshops this week we’ve been making the swirling circles traditional to Indian Kantha cloths.    They are made with the simple running stitch that carefully begins from the outside edge and goes around and around, advancing a few threads each time.   Cautiously, carefully, slow, around and around, then all of a sudden when we aren’t even thinking about it much,  we see that we have made a swirl.  It just happened.  Life happens the way it is supposed to.  No pre-drawing required.  Plunge in but go very slowly.   

Maybe that’s my mantra.  Plunge in.  Go Slow. 

Excerpts from the lecture

September 23 2016

Aeolian Theatre, London Ontario Canada

It is an Honour To Make a Quilt

Energy Cloth 2011   and  Memories of Wikwemikong 2008

from top left, something more magical than it ever was 1991, work in progress (big silk quilt), House with the Golden Windows, (two walls only) 1993, moon cloth 2016 long night 2016, Cry me a River 2001, Monumental simplicity 2012 and in the middle, Protection Blanket - the yellow Amish piece - 2005

Turning the Sky To Cloth 2015 and Lake 2014

from top ,  indigo checkerboard in progress, beautiful blocks of time (bound journals, on going) The Rescuer 2001, velvet journal series, and She Sees Herself As Warm 1996 Velvet Journal series

Monday May 2
5 pm end of year banquet,   guest speaker 7 pm Judith Martin
Sudbury District Quilting and Stitchery Guild
Bryston's On The Park, Copper Cliff Ontario

Some of the Millennium Journal 1998-2001

from top  Millennium Journal 2001, two embroidered pillow cases, Hold Me 2009 and Self Hug 2015, Jack's Quilt Lucky Protection 2011, coming clockwise, Turning The Air To Cloth 2015, Lake 2014, In the Centre of the Body is the Soul 1996, Cry Me a River 2001 at bottom, Sisu 2013, two 50th wedding banners 1999, twenty  four hour care 2010 and Each Stitch is a prayer, 2004, the pale Amish in the middle of the photo.

The process of quiltmaking is a strange one.  I become a housewife.  I wash the fabric, dry it, dye it, iron it, sew it.  Design is urgent, but making a quilt requires a love of tedium.  Those hours are filled with thoughts, daydreams, cycles of emotions.  Good feelings turn into sadness. Frustrated boredom turns into meditative calm.  When I’ve finished, there it is.  My vision realized.

Time has passed.  Things have been learned.  Each quilt is a painting for me, but quilts also have that functional possibility.  In the present day world of mass produced things, a unique, finely crafted object becomes a statement of the quality of life I believe in.  It is an honour to make a quilt. 

Janet Koike

Workshops

Y-O-U and Hand Stitch

Use materials to their fullest potential.

Use slow and tender methods of construction and mark making through hand stitch.

Create artworks that relate to our contemporary world.

Personal story, contemporary fine art and archetypal first shapes are the pathways into a stitched artwork true to your own heart.  The meaning of the piece arrives through making and doing, through listening carefully to the materials you work with.

The title of this workshop references collage artist Hanna Hoch's advice to embroidery artists.  

"You crafts women, modern women, who feel that your spirit is in your work, who are determined to lay claim to your rights, who believe your feet are firmly planted in reality, at least Y-O-U should know that your embroidery work is a documentation of your own era"  (she said this in 1918)

Contemplative Stitch

This workshop introduces the archetypal symbols and shapes used around the world and across time.  These first shapes connect us without words to our spiritual need for ritual and are the inspirational basis for original and personally scaled meditation panels.  Hands on instruction in Judy’s improvisational methods of working over foundation cloth in combination with traditional hand stitched construction methods and hand embroidery will start participants on a project that will continue to nurture the maker over a period of months.

This is a quiet workshop.  We will be guided by our sense of touch.  It is inspired by the successful Manitoulin Community Circle Project in which 149 women and men made several hand-stitched meditation panels for the local community during four years of weekly meetings.     Suggested length is five days.

Lectures

Judy Martin’s lectures mix poetry, visual art theory, concern for the environment, and social revolution with her own personal life experience.   Each lecture is about 40 minutes in length and is supported with digital presentation and/or a show and tell of her large body of work.   

1.  Adventures with natural dyeing in northern Ontario                   
2.  Art and life are all mixed up
3.  Slow stitching as social change: the Manitoulin Circle Project

This page is Judy Martin's  only promotion.  
She is offering workshops using stitch until spring 2017, then she will be on sabbatical from teaching in order to produce her own body of work.  If you are interested in inviting Judy to your community to teach or speak,   please use the contact email and make an inquiry.   

Keynote Address, Espanola fibre festival

detail, Layers of Time  The fourth panel of the Manitoulin community circle project.  Materials:  re-cycled wool blanket, recycled lace doilies, linen damask, beads, french knots, cross stitch, back stitch, eyelet stitch, all by hand, completely constructed with hand stitch and quilted by hand.  Judith e Martin and community, 2013.

 

Earth Ark (left ) and Precious Water (right) installed in the Espanola United Church for the Espanola fibre festival

I’d like to speak tonight about the process of making .  I want to state my belief that making something slowly with one’s hands is perhaps one of the most nourishing things one can do.  Creating something from nothing – or better, creating something new from something no longer needed or wanted is healing for the planet and for us.   

The panels of the Manitoulin Circle project are now finished objects.  It seems that every few months they are invited ‘out’ and the women who made them and I are given a chance to re-visit them.  We re-consider them.  We reflect.  

The Marimekko secret back of Earth Ark in foreground, Layers of Time in background

These panels are different than my personal work.  They are larger.  They are more.  More hands, more touch, more laughter, more conversations, more personal trauma, more catching up on books or television series.  The process of making them is held within them, and is why the finished products seem so important.

I’m a dyer and I'm learning about local Manitoulin plant dyes.  I'm a stitcher and am attracted to work that is not only large in measurements, but also in length of time.  I like it when I can’t see the end of a project, and when I can’t touch the edges.   My work is about the  process of making it. 

Two women thinkers I’d like to remark on tonight.  The first is Sue Bender, author of a book called Plain and Simple, a woman’s journey to the Amish.  She lived with an Amish family for 6 months, and noted that the women treated everything they did as if it was a ritual.  Whether breakfast for the family or a stunning jewel toned quilt – everything was given respect.  Art making is connected to daily life. 

The second woman is a British metal smith who writes and thinks about slow craft as social change.  Her name is Helen Carnac.  Helen Carnac calls making things by hand and experiencing the nourishment that comes from creating for its own sake rather than for commercial purposes   a  ‘social revolution‘.   I haven’t used those words before about hand work and am struck by them.

Marimekko secret back of Precious Water (foreground) and Mended World (background)

One week ago Friday Thanksgiving weekend, I was stitching by the fireplace.  It was raining outside.  I realized something.  I realized that ALL I really want to do is stitch.  All I want to do is hold cloth and mark it.  I love it so much.   I’ve been pretty busy with the career side of my work in the last month  - speaking about it, writing about it, promoting it on facebook, receiving awards for it, shipping it to exhibitions, getting it into urban commercial galleries so that more people can see it, perhaps buy it,  but in reality, that all comes second for me.  I just want to DO the work.   I just want to stitch.  The career stuff won’t be there anyway if the work didn't come first.  The work needs to be done, not just for itself, but for me.  For my emotional health.  I need to do it.  It’s who I am.  Last week on that rainy evening by the fire I stitched and realized that the process of the making is as important as the end result. 

The nice  thing about textile art is that it is possible for others to see the process.  It’s not as mystical as some other art media.  The process is evident.  The hand’s gesture is evident.  So go with that.  Take pleasure in what you do.  

Mended World, (left), Trinity (centre) and Layers of Time (right) installed in the Espanola United Church for the fibre festival.  Also notice the book of hands open on a table in near left of photo

My passion has always been stitch.  I've stitched nearly every day since I was about 8.  Stitching is a life-long love affair.  As I get older I worry less and less about making a product that others might like, and more and more about spending what time I have left to dye and stitch on a large scale.  I will be teaching the techniques of the project in Newfoundland next October, and have started to prepare for that.  It’s really challenging to fit four years of slow making and a life time of inspiration into a three day workshop that people will actually pay the craft council  of Newfoundland to take.  The prep is taking quite a bit of time but perhaps it’s like writing this speech.  Both make me look at the circle project again.   Re-considering how the panels went together and what the project meant is helping me to think through what and how I want my life to be like.  Artful.

I am ambitious and have the dream to be recognized for my stitching but it’s way too easy to let the career advancement become more important than doing the work.  Doing the work is the most important thing.  Take great pleasure in the doing.  Slow down, breathe, stitch, dye, knit or felt, whatever it is that you do, do it with respect.  Honour the experience. This is my motherly advice tonight.  

The above text is just part of Judith e Martin's keynote address to the Espanola Fibre Festival.  If you want to read the entire lecture, email Judy and make a request.
One of the nicest things that happened that evening was that several of the participants spoke spontaneously about their experience stitching with Judy. 

Artist's talk at art gallery of sudbury opening reception for mended world

My career as an artist has had the swift passage of time as a constant theme.  This started when I became a mother.  It was my children and how beautiful they were in the sunlight and the realization that they were changing so quickly that made me paint them.  Time's passage was the subject.

Time.
How to stop it? Catch it?
How to slow it down?
How to make it visible - sometimes time whirls by so quickly , we don't even notice
How to remember it?
How to honour it.

This exhibition is connected by time.
There are two floors, and each floor represents four years of time.  They actually represent the same four years.  The upper floor is me, going through the four years day by day, living a quiet life out there by the lake, or traveling to see my children marry.  All that whirl of time is contained with the slowest way of making a mark.  Hand stitch.

Time time time
Touch touch touc.

On this floor is the work of the Manitoulin Circle Proejct.  although the intent of these panels was not to mark out four years of visible time, that is what happened.

Every Thursday, for four years between October 2009 and August 2013, a group of us met in the United Church Hall in Little Current and hand stitched these pieces together.  That's over 200 Thursdays.

That time commitment alone is amazing.  Altogether, 144 different individuals put their hands into the work of this project, and that is also amazing.  Most of those were visitors - people who would come out once or twice to see what was going on and add a few stitches.  There were about thirty who I would have to say were regulars, and I see many of them here today.  Thank you for coming.

We had a kind of mantra.  "We're not fast - but we're slow"

These panels were hand stitched.  That is a very quiet way of making art.  It is a very slow way of making art.  Stitching uses the body's gesture. It uses the sense of touch.

These panels wer emade with textiles from past times. Used linen table cloths, woolen blankets, lace doilies in combination with new silk and new threads.  All the materials were donated.

We started with the Earth Ark panel in 2009.  We started with the green silk squares.  This was the only part that I was absolutely sure about.  Working with the fabric is different than working on paper.  Things change.  As the knots on the silk squares accumulated, we could see that we had made not only the lower half of a circle, but an island with planted fields.  And it looked like a boat.

Like Noah's ark, all of these panels are about saving.  They take the reparation of the earth as their subject.  They use recycled cloth and are made by hand, slowly and carefully.  Many individuals came together to make them for the wider community of Manitoulin.  What we have made will outlast us.  These are for the future, heirlooms.  Life affirming meditation panels.

The titles of the four panels are Earth Ark, Precious Water, Layers of Time and Mended World.

We signed in each Thursday.  Showing the book with the first 89 signatures, and reading the journal entry about feeling as if I belonged to the community.  Like in Babar the elephant king's well planned cities. Reading from October 2010.

There are several of my ladies here today.  Please come up with me to the front.

The second book of signatures - reading from September 2012 about what the circle project has given us.  Camaraderie, healing.   We continue and continue...


For a review by the Manitoulin Expositor about the opening of Mended World....click here.

Opening of Threadworks 2013

Judy e Martin spoke at the opening of Threadworks 2013 on April 28.  The exhibition continues until June 9 at the Wellington County Museum and Archives.


above video by Evelyn Ward de Roo

Details below of  just three of the 58 artworks made with needle and thread on the theme of Water.

 But Will It Hold Water? by Evelyn Ward de Roo, juror's award

Spring Thaw by Tracey Lawko, award for free motion embroidery                              

Sirens by Mary Kroetsch,

What is the Manitoulin Circle Project?

Judy made a 7 minute presentation to the regional United Church presbytery on Saturday January 21 about the circle project. Clergy came from the Sudbury area and from along the highway 17 corridor along the north shore.

It was one of about a dozen other 'show and tell' presentations.

Shown is the top half of the third panel, Precious Water, displayed as an alter cloth in the Espanola United Church.


The fire pot was lit during one of the presentations.
We held our breath.

INSTALLED

October 30, 10 am
Little Current United Church


Judy will give a short presentation about this meditation panel, the first of four, as part of the morning service.

Quiet Simplicity ,
A Trunk Show

Pomegranate Quilt Guild
September 21 8 pm
Shaarei Shomayim synagogue
470 Glencarin Ave Toronto

Judy will speak about her thirty year career of making art quilts and cloth books.

Time has been main subject in her work. Time is a material.


pictured: Mother Daughter wildflower book 1999

A cloth book. Pressed wildflowers from daily walks with her 6 year old daughter when the family first moved to Manitoulin Island encased in mylar and stitch. Embroidered personal journal text by the artist. Pencil drawings by April, (her daughter 6 years old then, Concordia art student today) transferred to fabric. Silk and rayon, 30 pages.

Manitoulin Circle Project

On December 12, 2010, Judy spoke about the Manitoulin Circle Project during the Advent service at Little Current United Church.


Earth Ark was displayed.

The first of four meditation panels that are being made by Judy and the local community every Thursday in the church hall.

Where is the centre of the universe?







digital presentation and trunk show

Friday, April 23 at 7 pm
St. Lawrence College
Kingston, Ontario

room 12050 2nd floor (entrance E 12)
$5.00

Fibreworks Kingston 'Slow Art' workshop participants no charge

613 544 7324
fibreworks@cogeco.ca

Metaphor and Moi

trunk show



November 19, 2009
7 pm



Mindemoya Community Centre
Manitoulin Island Canada

Here are some highlights from the article that Jackie White sent to the Expositor to promote Judy's talk.

Why does Judy quilt? "I love to stitch. I love the look and power of old quilts. I love the story telling and the many layers of meaning. I love the connection to the bed and all of life's major and minor rituals and passages. I feel that quilts are a woman artist's most honest medium."

At the national level, two of her quilts won top awards at the Canadian Quilters Association's National Juried quilt show in Saskatoon last May. "Twenty Four Hour Care" won first place in the traditional wall quilt category and "Memory of Wikwemikong" won second place in abstract wall quilt.

If quilting doesn't keep her busy enough, Judy is working on a second BA. She already has an Honours Bachelor of Fine Arts from Lakehead University (1993). And the current degree is an Honours BA in Embroidered Textiles. Middlesex University in the UK gives creditation to the courses that she is studying with the Julia Caprara School of Textile Art. She participates in this study by email and phone tutorials and sends her work in for assessment every four months. She has been doing this for three years and has three more left.

After quilting for four decades, it is amazing she is still motivated to pursue this hobby. What keeps Judy going? "The next one. I just love to do it. I'm passionate about art and about cloth and about communicating with others through visual means."
Judy Martin's new work reflects her current passion for hand stitching. She's used embroidery before in her quilts, but the new work takes it further to a more powerful level. Judy says that she "has become much simpler in the designs I like to use in my work. Circles predominate, and grids of dots are the favourites. I want to affect people at an emotional level."

If you want to meet this remarkable woman and see her outstanding quilts, please come to the Mindemoya Community Centre on November 19th at 7 pm. Guest admission is $3.00.

La Cloche Talk for distinguished artist 2009

LaCloche talk 7:30 p.m. July 3 2009.

Last spring I read Stephen King’s autobiography/ how-to book On Writing. Although he was speaking about writing, his advice applies to visual art.

“Go into your studio at a set time every day.”

Go into your studio, shut the door and do your work. Think of it as a ritual. Compare it to going to the bedroom each evening each night in order to get ready for bed. Our body and mind become accustomed to the custom of falling asleep and thus accessing the dream world.

“The rational mind relaxes and ordinary events suddenly appear beautiful or emotionally charged” (Stephen King).

When you go to the studio at a set time each day your body and mind become accustomed to accessing the awake dream world. It's easier to create artwork if you go to a place every day where the muse will know where to find you.

Also, here are truisms from recent journals.

1. Be orderly in your life. Be violently original in your work.
2. Be solitary. Read literature. Return to “otherness”. Know yourself better.
3. Try it. Try the new method or technique, the new subject, the new friend.
4. Do what you LOVE.
5. Ask "What are my concerns?" and "What do I want to do all day?"

Somewhere There are Heirlooms

stitched mixed media on canvas


Artist Talk
August 10
at the Gore Bay Museum

The Red Thread exhibition
at the Gore Bay
Museum

Last day: August 10

My Light Green Heart
Lecture during the Summer
School of the Canadian
Embroider's Guild
in London Ontario

7 p.m.,
University
of Western Ontario
June 5, 2008

My Light Green Heart

Lecture proceeding
two day workshop
The Power and Beauty of
Hand Stitched Textiles


Friday March 7
St Lawrence College
Kingston, Ontario
7:00 p.m.

In the Center of the Body is the Soul

November 22, 2006
Art and Life are all mixed up
trunk show
presented to York Heritage Guild meeting
more than 300 in attendance