big girl quilts

I did more sewing on the deck until 6 pm and then did my walk through and cut the long grass that edged each garden, bending over and not falling, and then we had soup and I lay down again.  Now I’m back in my studio, in-sewing one of the quilts that had gone wonky.  She texted.  She thinks I’m tired and I am.  

Dialogue with the invisible

She knits.

She will finish this work and make others, devoting herself to this occupation of the hands of women for thousands of years, to this creative, calming activity, which legitimizes idleness of the mind and gives the possibility of a secret dialogue, deaf and mute, with the invisible, always present.  

about Russian poet Maria Tsvetena by her daughter Arianna Efron

I do not know and should not be expected to know

I make very simple, large constructed textiles.  All my work is hand stitched, a slow method that gives me solace as well as a place where I can gain perspective in these worrisome times.  

I will make an installation that pays homage to the beauty of damask.  I will highlight the special quality of this type of heirloom linen fabric that becomes more beautiful as it ages.  

Re-reading this proposal is making me have second thoughts about covering the old fabric.  I read Celia Pym’s book on mending yesterday and she said that she wants to show the story of the textile when she mends it and doesn’t cover everything old with new.  

I don’t know and I should not be expected to know at this early stage.  

Conversation with my daughter

You can only talk about your own experience and your own family heritage.  

Mending this bed quilt is more than re-claiming the linen damask backing cloth and more than extending its life.  Mending it in a beautiful, artful manner will honour the life-cycle of the flax and the labour that went into processing the fibres and the weaving of them.  

You are moving this linen from domestic work and allowing it to rest.  

  

Like an ocean. Like the sky.

Why do it? 

The older I get, the more mysterious that seems.  When I’m really working well, the work has no meaning.  I want to get in touch with something more mindless.  Intuitive.  

Things are formless, hard to grasp.  Like an ocean.  Like the sky.  I never thought to call my work a pleasure.  I just felt the compulsion to do it.  The making is not just busy work.  The making and the thinking bypass the brain yet still leave signs of intelligence.  

Vija ‘s Celmin’s  interview in Border Crossing #87 much shortened and paraphrased.  

Linen

Space and Time!  

What I guessed at.  

What I guessed when I loafed on the grass.  

What I guessed while I lay alone in my bed

and again as I walked the beach 

under the paling stars of the morning.  Space and Time.  

Walt Whitman

that story was your life

 I sometimes imagine my whole life as though I was a needle leaving a trail of thread that sewed together the world as I went by, quilting it altogether in some way that matters even though it can hardly be traced.  As though walking was sewing and sewing was telling a story and that story was your life.  

Rebecca Solnit. (Abbreviated slightly) 

Processing Mortality

David Hockney’s work is a manifestation of unconditional love for the universe.  

“Don’t you see?  In my pictures, I take all the trauma out.  That’s my form of resistance.  “ David Hockney 
 

The golden notebook

 6 am

We are both up.  He has started the coffee and is unloading the dishwasher.  Today - I’m finishing the Beauty sleeve.  Because I’m up early, I think I can do 30 minutes of journal transcribing.  I’m working on the journal I kept the summer I turned 40.  The Golden Notebook.    

the monstera

There is a lot of demand to perform biographical confessions as a means to authenticity.  Yet these expectations come with moral obligation to provide solution for world problems. Artists aren't given room to think about the world in complex ways outside of their autobiography.  

Artists tell stories about what is happening in the world we inhabit.  The story does not have to be exclusively about us.  We can be witnesses.  

Abbas Akhaven - 2026 Venice Biennale representative from Canada

Sunshine in sky

The curator wrote me an email and asked for a meeting on April 29 at 10 am. I haven’t answered yet, but am very stoked about this 2027 project. 

 

Spring Song

Everything suddenly golden still, the sun a hovering golden bird.  Nothing moves.  Soft clouds wait like floating houses in the sky and the storm beyond the horizon waits.  Planets stopped in their tracks as if forever was now and the grass roots knew it all.  

But they don’t you know and here I am with both hands high under the skirts of the world.  Trying to figure it out. 

Everything rearranged itself from is to was.  The white moon tracks her silver self across the purple night replacing time with a celestial hour glass.  

Al Purdy

Lament

The texture of a life devoted to poetry is activist, in the deep sense.  Quite often it is not activist in the superficial sense.  You come at poetry with the momentum of having failed.  It’s only when other communication is impossible that a poem HAS to exist. 

A response to the catastrophic situation were in.  The suffering has gone beyond what the mind can manage.

Alice Oswald 

Be softer. Be rounder.

Attend to the voice inside me that opens towards curiosity and exploration.

Don't listen to the dark voices that say that I am too old, or an imposter.    (Zak Foster's newsletter)

My design wall in Mexico xo

 

4:00 am

I thought about what Ned advised me.  Only do what I want to do.  So, I’m in my studio.  I’ve got the phone timer on for one hour and I’m going to figure out more for the blue circle piece.  It’s got a lot left to do, and it’s what I WANT to do.  

Not paperwork.  Not re-sizing and gathering images.  

Hold your mind empty and tranquil

 In 1979, Agnes Martin painted The Islands, a set of 12 paintings, very very pale.  Each of them 6 feet square. 

the beauty of the green earth

 In my window, with the sugar plum tree and the snow on the deck so high, I can hardly see it.  Tomorrow we go to Toronto for the opening and a lot of other things.  Today, I need to get ready.  But first, I’m putting at least an hour into my circular tree everlasting, the beauty of the green earth.  

Cape of Rain

The Margaret Atwood references for this title are actually two poems.  One of them is about survival. The other one has the line: I pull about me running, a cape of rain.  In my mind, I put them together. 

During that time

So much love that all that can be done with the overflow is to create.  It is not a matter of wanting to.  Not as an act of will, one solely must.  

Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Poem Blanket

When women take embroidery and other textile arts beyond their accustomed uses; out of private, out of domestic, out of the female sphere, and make them large (like Sheila Hicks) unruly (like Louise Bourgeois) or ambitious (like the Bayeux Tapestry) it is a performative act.  

It performs gender.  It demands acknowledgment on a scale that tiny textiles do not.  

Janet Berlo