FIBRE ART – LANDSCAPE

Landscape Images

I begin with an obsession for material. By de-threading burlap sheets, and wrapping and weaving with this strong and delicate thread, the hand worked process of this fibrework reads as repetitive, laborious, obsessive, and intimate. Through this material, I return to the landscapes of my past and present: the lower Montaigne forests of the Rockie Mountains, and the thick woods of Northern Ontario. Dense and overlapping, the woods – much like our individual and Canadian collective memories – provide spaces of isolation and protection, while simultaneously reminding me of being home and being lost.

Desiring an interconnective rather than imperialistic relationship with the land, I approach representation through abstraction, so that the work suggests landscape by way of tactile experience and personal memory. With these fibre works, I hope to extend boundaries of media specificity, and instinctively combine material to find commonality and overlap. The collapsing/expanding of media genre includes the divisions between fibre arts/craft and fine arts.   In this way, each fibre woodscape is attached to a wood panel which has (often) been painted to reiterate a sense of foreground and beyond. With these pieces, I tether the process of craft work to a gothic aesthetic and Canadian landscape sensibility.