Textiles Open Us Up

Zak Foster gave a lecture in October 2023 to Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond Virginia, USA.  He quoted seven of the many artists he had interviewed for his Seamside Podcast.  He quoted Judy Martin  at around 22 minutes in the one  hour lecture/  Judy spoke about the poetic resonance she finds in making quilts and looking at the sky.  The entire talk is very interesting and addresses identity and vulnerability and how textiles help us to learn about ourselves and also connect with others.  You can watch Zak's entire talk on youtube at this link.

If you are interested in listening to the Seamside podcast with Zak Foster and Judy Martin from April 2023, you can click on this other link. 

ALSO:  For the New Year 2024, Zak brought together highlights from Seamside, and included some of the interview with Judy.  So here is yet another link to Zak's Seamside podcast that will take you to How to Ring in 2024 with Friends.  Thank you Zak Foster ! 

"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  

Zak Foster interviewed Judy Martin for SEAMSIDE

Unfolding in the Trees Not Thinking by Judy Martin, work in progress

Zak Foster interviewed Judy on Tuesday March 28 for his podcast SEAMSIDE.  

SEAMSIDE explores the inner world of textiles and what working with cloth has taught us about being human.  The episode with Judy Martin will air within the next few weeks.  Zak is a thoughtful quilter who has built an online community forum, Quilty Nook, to be a place where creative people meet up and learn from each other.  To prepare for the interview, Zak sent Judy a page of questions as a way of getting to know her and she sent answers back.  Like this one:          

What is the most important lesson that textiles have taught you?       

1.  Textiles are like the human body and wear out with age.  They carry lived time with them, it is a most beautiful thing.  

2.   Quilts have a connection to the bed and the life passages that happen there.  Besides birth, death, love and sex, we also dream in bed, we are vulnerable when we fall asleep, we read in bed.  This gives quilts a metaphorical power not found in other art forms.  

3.   The symbols and shapes used in traditional quilt patterns are connected to the archetypes that are understood around the world and across centuries.  Bed quilts made using these codes were packed with meaning, often about protection, fertility, celebration and social comment.

4.  The process of making a quilt is nourishing and is as important for well being as is the finished product.    

There are a lot of podcasts these days with many different slants and Zak's questions and thoughtful answers make SEAMSIDE one that is worth our precious time.  Over a dozen interviews are currently available there and the podcast is available wherever you get your podcasts.  Here are direct links:

Coulter Fussell  spoke to Zak during March. 

Maura Grace Ambrose spoke to Zak during February.

A direct link to the interview with Judy Martin coming soon! 

Stitched Diaries: A conversation With artist Judy Martin

a few of Judy Martin's journals

Vassar University student Grace Gregory interviewed Judy Martin in 2017.
Grace was enrolled in a class taught by Lisa Collins entitled Exquisite Intimacy, Quilts, Quilters and Quiltmaking and was fulfilling an assignment.

Here is the audio skype interview.  Stitched Diaries:   A Conversation With Artist Judy Martin

The stitch journal, Not To Know But To Go ON - every day, one complete skein of embroidery floss for 3 years. 
July 2010 until July 2013.

Illustrations of Judy's work in journals and quilts are included along with Grace's intelligent questions.  The video is 26 minutes and there are some gaps...just be patient.   The conversation is quite beautiful.

2015 journal

Illustrations on the video are taken from Judy's blog.