Saturday, March 16, 2024

Poet in Love selected for Renewal exhibition

Judy Martin's entry Poet in Love was one of 33 pieces selected by jurors David Kaye, Leona Herzog and Brandt Eisner for the SAQA Canadian Regional Juried Exhibition Renewal, from among 187 entries.   The exhibition will debut at the Homer Watson House and Gallery in Kitchener, Ontario from July 5 to September 8, 2024.  The exhibition will tour until early 2027.

Congratulations to all of us (see list below) and thank you to the jurors and to the hard-working SAQA committee who organized this opportunity. 

Terry Aske - Witch Hazel Magic

Susan Avishai - Rise Again

Heather Bennett - Covid Spring

Sabrina Capune - A Chinook Renewal of Winter

Victoria Carley - Blakiston 2023

Robynne Cole - Life Rings True

Mary Cope - Beneath Our Surface

Millie Cumming - Please, Please

Donna-Fay Digance - Forest Renewal

Lori A. Everett - Forest Hope

Kristi Farrier - My Mother’s Garden

Mita Giacomini - Bovinity

Heather A. Hager - Urban Renewal

Margaret Inkster - Frosty Fronds

Joan Flett Kilpatrick - Celebrate

Steph Kincaid - Can’t Keep Me Down

Tracey Lawko - Harbingers

Toni Major - Leaving the Dark

Judy Martin Poet in Love

Marie McEachern - First Blooms

Beth McKay - Making Peace

Lee McLean - Reclaiming Joy

Diane Nunez - Twister 2

Jenny Perry - There is a Crack in Everything

Lorraine Roy - Germination

Helena Scheffer - Kiribati

Susan Selby - Winter Solstice

Linda Strowbridge - Long Street Legacy

Maggie Vanderweit - Find Your Way

Kit Vincent - Tri-Colour White

Anna Wagner Ott - Shroud

Lynda Williamson - Passing On

Beth Susan van Wyngaarden - Kim’s Pine Cone 

Thursday, March 14, 2024

Marking Time with Fabric and Thread


Judy Martin's stitched journal, Not to Know But To Go On, is one of the 25 featured pieces in a new book scheduled for release in late October 2024.  The author of the book is Tommye McClure Scanlin and the publisher is Schiffer.

It will be possible to purchase Marking Time With Fabric and Thread at any book store.

Tuesday, March 12, 2024

All Things Can Be Mended enters private collection

watercolour and thread on paper with pierced holes, framed in wood 18.5  x 19"   2019

sold through Guildworks in Prince Edward County Ontario  

Wednesday, February 28, 2024

Softer and Dreamier , a solo exhibition at the Festival of Quilts 2024


Judith E Martin has been invited by the Festival of Quilts to mount a solo show for the 2024 festival that occurs in Birmingham United Kingdom August 1 - 4 2024.  This is Europe's largest patchwork and quilting event.  

The title of Judy's show is:  Softer and Dreamier

In her solo exhibition, Judy Martin will be showing approximately 20 new quilts that explore the cosmic circles in the sky above us as well as the dream world within us.  Informed by poetry, memoir, fine art, and the life passages that happen in bed, Martin creates large hand-stitched quilts and has been doing so for over 40 years.  

Judy and Ned are going to Birmingham for the festival and look forward to meeting other quilt lovers.

Friday, January 26, 2024

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 ! 


Thursday, December 21, 2023

"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  

Friday, December 15, 2023

In the Middle of the World catalogue: second printing

The Forever by Judy Martin. 
four wool blankets with plant dyed wool, velvet and linen couched with wool yarn, 2021
shown as it was displayed at the Mississippi Valley Textile Museum, Oct -Dec 2021
In the Middle of the World catalogue pages 56 and 57

The beautiful catalogue that documents the bodies of work created by Canadian artists Penny Berens and Judith e Martin has had a second printing in mid November.  The 125 page soft cover book includes a scholarly essay by freelance curator Miranda Bouchard.  Copies are available from the artists and curator, email Judy (see sidebar) for a mailed copy.  Cost is $35 plus shipping.

The catalogue is also available in the following outlets.   

The Mississippi Valley Textile Museum in Almonte, Ontario

The Muse (Douglas Family Art Centre/Lake of the Woods Museum) in Kenora, Ontario

The Manitoulin Expositor book store in Little Current, Ontario.

Thank you everyone for such amazing support of our work.  We appreciate it!  

Special mention of thanks to the Ontario Arts Council for ongoing support of Judy's work and for this exhibition and publication project.