Resisting Through Fibre Arts
By Julie Graff, curator
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.
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, to borrow from American intellectual, academic and activist bell hooks.
In the artists’ words
In her writings, artist Ann Newdigate underscores the appeal of tapestry work—its flexibility, the ability it affords artists to move from one tradition to the next, to upset the established order and to defy hierarchies. According to Newdigate, tapestries belong everywhere and nowhere; they are both everything and nothing, embodying the creative and radical notion of uncertainty. By calling on embroidery, quilting and tapestry-making techniques, artists mobilize a “textile” way of thinking, a thought process that conceives of a relationship between the work and the world that is rooted in everyday life and actions. This type of thinking can eventually move away from textile to explore other materials, like plastic, while still remaining intimately tied to textile.
Collection of the Canada Council Art Bank, Ottawa Photographer(s): Brandon Clarida Image Services
“[A]rtists mobilize […] a thought process that conceives of a relationship between the work and the world that is rooted in everyday life and actions.”
Artists distort textile as readily as they pay homage to the historicity and enduring nature of fibre arts, not only using specific materials but also using manual weaving and sewing techniques, which are an echo of directories of movements, motifs and techniques and which evoke arts communities and mythological figures.
Collection of the Canada Council Art Bank, Ottawa
Photographer(s): Brandon Clarida Image Services
For example, multimedia artist Michèle Provost distorts the method behind the sampler—a harmless activity to be sure, which has been created by generations of young women to learn stitches—in order to explore the mechanisms for alienation and exclusion in modern life in her work, The sampler : une histoire urbaine (2002). Tapestry maker Murray Gibson harks back to powerful weavers in Greek mythology, alluding to the Morai, or Fates, who spin the threads of our lives from birth to death.
Themes
The exhibition also explores the ways that fibre arts, which are rooted in the everyday and domesticity, question the boundaries between private and public spaces, between the intimate and the political.
Through textile, artists deconstruct and reinterpret the dominant narratives, providing an alternative vision of social and political structures. This can mean deconstructing—quite literally—clothing in order to reveal the patriarchal and imperialist structures that make up the social fabric, as is the case with works by Ruth Scheuing, Barbara Todd and Zoe Lambert.
Collection of the Canada Council Art Bank, Ottawa Photographer(s): Brandon Clarida Image Services
It can also mean weaving memories again and again. The works then become vectors for memories, enabling us to retrace family and community stories while creating post-memory spaces. Textile embodies a thought process over a length of time that enables us to retrace the thread of memory and intergenerational and community-based trauma. It enables us to unmake and remake public spaces and to creatively address the gaps in recorded history, cultural oppression or queer marginalization.
Chantal Gibson uses braiding to upset, defy and counter the erasure of Black people and communities within history books, speaking to a vibrant presence that literally overflows from these truncated stories.
Lastly, not only do works like those of Carl Stewart and Haley Bassett celebrate love and sensuality, but they also allude to the radical potential of joy and human connection, definitively blurring the lines between the intimate and the political.