Resistant Fibres

Resistant Fibres originates from a desire to showcase the Canada Council Art Bank’s textile works of art. Since the 1960s, contemporary artists have explored the subversive potential of fibre arts, on the fringes of art history’s canon.

Resistant Fibres features works of art by Siku Allooloo, Haley Bassett, Bob Boyer, Evelyn Coutellier, Erika DeFreitas, Frances Dorsey, Nancy Edell, General Idea, Chantal Gibson, Murray Gibson, Zoe Lambert, Joanne Lynes, Ann Newdigate, Michèle Provost, Ruth Scheuing, Carl Stewart and Barbara Todd.

Learn more about the artists featured in the exhibition

Curatorial Statement

For decades, fibre artists have mobilized a subversive medium and used it to express their creativity, find comfort and establish ties with others, as well as to deliver messages and denounce injustice.

Textile enables us to retrace the thread of intergenerational and community memory and trauma. It contributes to dismantling patriarchal and imperialistic structures that make up the social fabric, to creatively addressing the gaps in recorded history and to embodying the radical nature of joy, sensuality and intimacy.

Read the full curatorial statement

About the curator

Resistant Fibres is curated by Julie Graff, a researcher, cultural worker and emerging curator based in Ottawa, on the unceded, unsurrendered territory of the Anishinabe Algonquin Nation. With a PhD in art history and social anthropology, she is a postdoctoral researcher at the Laboratoire international de recherche sur l’imaginaire du Nord, de l’hiver et de l’Arctique. Since 2022, she has also served as Artistic Director of Maison MONA, a non-profit organization dedicated to the promotion of public art and heritage. Graff is an active contributor to both academic journals and contemporary art magazines such as Vie des arts and Espace art actuel.

A black and gray X is painted on a tan and beige rectangle with the word “wrong” repeated inside a blue section at the bottom.

Ann Newdigate, And from the southern hemisphere came a wrong sign/ It ain't what you say, it's the way that you say it, 1988 Photographer(s): Brandon Clarida Image Services

“Fibre arts have long been considered to be lesser than, due to being associated with domesticity and being specific to women’s work. Through their practice, the artists whose works are on display in this exhibition reassess the past and current statuses of fibre arts, thereby reworking history with their hands.”

—Julie Graff, curator

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About the Art Bank

The Canada Council Art Bank makes contemporary art available to a wide public across the country through art rental, exhibitions and outreach activities. With more than 17,000 works by over 3,000 artists, the Art Bank is home to the largest collection of contemporary Canadian art in the world. It houses paintings, sculptures, drawings, photographs and prints by emerging and established artists, including a significant number of works by Indigenous artists.