Judith Martin       

		I am delighted to introduce my friend Judith Martin. Judy is a sensitive storyteller whose quilts capture the daily experiences of home and family. In her quilts Judy explores the relationships between traditional women's craft and fine art's conceptualism. She combines traditional quilt patterns with multi-cultural symbols concerning birth, death and sexuality, always posing puzzling contemporary questions. I am often moved by Judy's work which is at once deeply personal and universal.
She grapples with issues of relationships between mothers and daughters, husbands and wives. She does not shy away from questioning how she can balance being an artist with her responsibilities to home, family and community. She doesn't tell us it is easy, but she shows us that it can be done. Judy is a well known teacher and lecturer. She exhibits widely and is the winner of numerous awards. She lives on Manitoulin Island, Ontario with her husband and family. - Mary Holdgrafer.

Judith writes:
"Artists have no choice but to express their lives. They have only, and that not always, a choice of process. This process does not change the essential content of the work, which can only be their life." Anne Truitt

"Quilt making is my art process. Its subject is my life story, which is typical of many women my age. I am married, have children and work outside the home. I have aging parents, an emptying nest, and several sets of friends. I live close to nature and I worry a lot. All of these things are the content of my art. If I could have chosen a process of how to express it, I would have chosen poetry or painting. The quilt language of traditional pattern and emotional colour has chosen me.

I like the fact that quilts carry with them a connection to the important rites of life passage that occur in bed. I also like that my artwork is made from cloth, which like the human body has a life span and will disintegrate in time. My quilts are metaphors. They are like poems."


Please click on these thumbnails to see the enlargements:

"Flesh and Blood"
Handling red cloth nourishes me. Making this huge quilt has somehow helped me to come to terms with the vulnerability of my family. It has given me strength. The repeated appliques of my hand cover the ocean of red fabric. The flying flowers and spirals that embellish the hands represent a new kind of love for my children and parents: letting them go.





"Inner Sonnet"
This is the text side of a two sided millennium journal.
The other side is layered fabric shapes.




Millennium Journal
This project is an attempt to record and recognize the turn of the millennium. Through the use of a personal symbolic language I have documented how each of my days was spent between November 1998 and February 2001. The complete work is divided into thirty individual hangings, each measuring 4' x 7'. The hangings are composed of 28 days, with every day made up of at least three layers of cloth. On the back of the hangings are single words taken from my written journal. These words locate the piece in time, place and emotion.


More about Judy:
Visit Judy's website at www.judithmartin.info
Judy's work can also be seen in the Portfolio of Makers of the Ontario Craft Council at www.craft.on.ca/portfolio

Judith has exhibited also at the Cambridge Gallery - click on 'Past Exhibitions' to see more - Counter Point: An Exhibition of Contemporary Quiltmaking, which ended on June 28th, and included this piece: "Hold Me"





Current exhibition: