Red Sparkling Water

 10 am and I’ve done so much - but also nothing. 6 am video chat - so sweet to see her.  She sang Mary had a little Lamb.  (She had changed her mind from Baa Baa Black sheep) so that was nice.  

And then I did my half hour journal work and Ned made his porridge and asked me if the long sleeved shirt he was wearing looked ok ‘tucked out’ because it was summer - and then I began sewing the two blanket parts together ( after photographing the gunnera and lupin harvests) and got so tired that I went to bed for half an hour and finished the Alice Munro.  

I started looking at the mysterious NUNO book for ideas about how to stitch the lower half.  The red sparkling water.  Of this piece.  

wind over water

 You paint like you create textiles and create textiles like you paint.  Wonderful.  I once had a tutor who told me to draw like you stitch and stitch like you draw.  You have achieved that.

You also demonstrate a strong understanding of a wide variety of artists and contextualize your work within 20th century allowing the artist’s thoughts to impinge and become integrated into your own thinking.  From that, you then allow the influences to develop into something new.  

Well done. 

From tutor Kay Swancutt’s email, 2011 

something always happens

 the world spins nightly toward its brightness

and we are on it.       CD Wright

dream

 

That night she dreamed of birds, long, bright red birds like flamingos, zipping through a black forest and making scallopy patterns, arcs of red that curved like their cries.  

Patricia Highsmith The Price of Salt 

who are you?

I am abandoning these, they are too beautiful.

roses and thorns

 

and you my love
my sweet, sweet love

acceptance

I would like to be like water, or rather like milk.
Completely pourable.
I am right now more like stone, or sand, or like a sauce full of lumps.
What does one do with lumps?

Louise Bourgeois 1957 journal entry

caress

the caress
is an awakening to a touching between us.
It is a gesture that is at the same time
an act, an intention, an emotion.
Luce Irigaray

I work like a gardener

I work for a long time, sometimes years, on the same canvas.
But all this time, there are periods, sometimes quite long,
when I'm not doing anything with it.

It doesn't worry me if a canvas remains in progress for years in my studio.
I think of my studio as a kitchen garden.
Here, there are artichokes.  There, potatoes. 
Leaves must be cut so the fruit can grow.
At the right moment, I must prune.

I work  like a gardener.
Things come slowly.
Things follow their natural course.
They grow, they ripen.
I must graft, I must water, as with lettuce.
Ripening goes on in my mind.
So I'm always working at a great many things at the same time.

Joan Miro  

soni

 

 

drawing on artist canvas with appliqued piecework
it looks like a pieced quilt, but it is not

beautiful, but not real

sing it again

through the opening of the mouth
we bring out sounds from
the mountain beneath the soul

john o' donohue

Maitri

 

The decision came to me to put these pieces together - make a second show.
Drop 'close ur eyes' from my David Kaye work - and put it with the canvas Ralli piece and the pinwheel madder square in square luminous path piece.  Also my Amish mirror diamond in square, and the red damsak with burnt holes.

I have so many pieces that are nearly done -

These ones make emotional sense to me as a group.

Maitri means loving kindness (pema)

dust clearing

I am ripping out my luminous halo path - removing all those multi-coloured memory cloth bits, and replacing them with plain plant dyed wool and silk, leaving only the red geese, flying in straight rows around the edges of this large square.  A simpler, purer look, but not the original intent.

Or is it?

Isn't my original intent to make a quilt as beautiful and compelling as I can?
Doesn't my 'new' aesthetic thake things away - pares away - all the dust from my old ways and my old cloth is part of that dust.

wall sized journal page

I'm driven up against the wall to write these.
I don't decide to do it.
They save me.
This is not paradise.
I don't have the equipment to penetrate the range of human activity that confronts me.
I can't figure it out.  can you?

Leonard Cohen  March 20 2014 CBC radio interview

plunge in and go slow

 

my quilting is not political
it is aware

imagination does not spring from nothing

 

every contact leaves a trace, all that is known departs from experience
The mind needs the senses.

chus martinez - curator  2016

our inner dream and our outer perception both spring from a common source
or primary phase of experience

marion milner - on not being able to paint  1950

a mile of patchwork

 

In one part of the mind, there really could be a fear of losing all sense of separating boundaries;

the boundaries between the tangible realities of the external world
and
the imaginative realities of the inner world of feeling and idea.

A fear of being mad.

A fear that letting go of common sense and letting in imagination means letting in madness.

Marion Milner

the open destiny of life

 

 

 

Such a story, the kind that begins "there was a woman, followed by plot"

The absolute line between two points which I've always despised...not for literary reasons, but because it takes all hope away.

Everyone, real or invented, deserves the open destiny of life.

Grace Paley

hand piecing with jack's butterfly

 

You have to abandon your past every day.
And accept it.

And if you can't accept it, then you have to do sculpture.

Louise Bourgeois

red birds

the fragility of verticality

the danger of being upright

Louise Bourgeois

Her most significant accomplishment is connecting the body and the physical experience to emotional life.
Mariianne Mays Wiebe