Above: 'Meme and Episteme' — Embroidered Gold Thread on Lace-edged Chintz, GAC collection,, ca. 2021
Fibre Arts
Fibre arts, encompassing practices such as weaving, knitting, quilting, embroidery, and crochet, have long been associated with domesticity and tradition. However, in a contemporary context they have emerged as one of the most significant and relevant forms of art, particularly within rural settings. bridgeing cultural divides, fostering community, and contributing to reconciliation..
Deeply embedded in the history of rural communities, these art forms are expressions of both necessity and creativity, often passed down through generations as a way to communicate cultural values, personal stories, and practical knowledge, and serve as a medium of connection to land, heritage, and local identity. These practices are as much about preserving cultural heritage as they are about creating new narratives that speak to the challenges of the present.
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"In the fabric of rural life, fibre arts are not mere expressions of tradition or craft, but sites of becoming—rhizomatic processes where material, gesture, and subjectivity deterritorialize and recompose one another. The loom is not a tool, but a machinic assemblage; the fibre, not medium, but a line of flight. Threads do not merely bind cloth—they encode time, repetition, and rupture as smooth space, a plane where hands, stories, sheep, soil, and color form a collective multiplicity—an agencement—with no beginning or end.​"
(Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Threads, 1991)
Fibre arts also offer a unique avenue for reconciliation, particularly in settler-colonial contexts. The Indigenous Peoples of North America, for example, have long used fibre arts as a means of storytelling and cultural expression, and reviving and preserving traditional fibre arts is an act of resistance and resilience, asserting their cultural identities in the face of colonial erasure. Fibre arts also align closely with contemporary ideals of diversity and equity. The creation of textiles is inherently a collaborative and inclusive process. It requires the contributions of many individuals, whether they are sharing techniques, materials, or stories. This emphasis on collaboration mirrors the growing recognition that art, in its most transformative form, is a communal practice.
As Susan Stewart reminds us, "Fibre is a material of resilience and decay, of softness and abrasion. Unlike paint or photography, it is intimate, messy, and metabolized slowly by the environment. It frays, it absorbs scent, it molds to the contours of time. To work with fibre is to work with a temporal material, one that marks the rhythm of days, of cycles. In a rural context, it aligns with harvest, with weather, with the rhythm of cows and children and chores. To make art from fibre is to engage in a rhythmics of power, a choreography of subaltern expression that slips beneath the radar of formal aesthetic institutions.
Fibre arts are often accessible and inclusive in terms of materials, tools, and skills. Unlike other high-cost art forms, textiles can be made from everyday items, such as old clothing, discarded fabric, or natural fibers. This accessibility allows a broad spectrum of people, regardless of socioeconomic background, to engage in creative expression. In rural areas, where resources may be scarcer, the DIY nature of fibre arts fosters self-sufficiency and sustainability while also enabling artistic creation from local, often recycled, materials.
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Fibre practice resists the regime of the signifier. It is not representation but production: a micro-politics of sensation and structure, of care and cunning. Each knot, each warp and weft, is a desiring machine—a connector between bodies, between land and symbol, between the human and the more-than-human. The rural artist does not create a fixed object, but passes through a fabric of affects: the wool still carries the scent of pasture, the rhythm of the sheep’s flank, the sound of weather through fenceposts. These works are not objects for decoding, but territories in flux—ecologies of gesture and memory.
(Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Threads, 1991)
In conclusion, fibre arts have proven themselves to be one of the most relevant and vital forms of contemporary art, particularly in rural settings. Their ability to connect individuals to their cultural roots, to facilitate reconciliation, and to emphasize diversity and equity positions them as powerful tools for social change and artistic expression. Whether in the hands of Indigenous artists preserving traditions or in the collective projects that bring rural communities together, fibre arts transcend their humble origins to become a dynamic force in the ongoing dialogue of contemporary art and society.
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"He who pays
no attention to
the world of fabric
pays no attention to
the fabric of the world."
Enisled Practices:
The Woven Gaze
Discipline and Fetish
in the 1960s Rural Imaginary
​It is necessary to begin not with the fibres themselves, but with the arrangements of knowledge and the diagrams of power that they animate. In the rural community of mid-20th century North America—hinging between postwar conformity and incipient countercultural rupture—fibre arts existed not merely as domestic activity or aesthetic pursuit, but as a technology of the body, a micro-discipline of hands, threads, and images that reveals, beneath its seemingly docile surface, an entire episteme of governance, desire, and symbolic transgression.
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To understand this textile moment is to situate ourselves not within the nostalgia of a pastoral ideal, but within the regimes of surveillance, self-regulation, and rural sovereignty that defined the postwar settlement. The rural was never a space untouched by power; rather, it was its diffusion site par excellence—a mesh of church, family, gender norms, and, most crucially, the figure of the RCMP constable. Here, the rural police officer did not only enforce law; he instantiated a local divinity, a sign of the state made flesh, moving through the fields not as enforcer but as symbol, as specter, as the imago of order.
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In British Columbia It was precisely this figure that came to be woven, stitched, and hooked into rugs, tapestries, and wall-hangings by women whose labour was traditionally considered apolitical. But if we follow the threads—literally and discursively—we see something else: not mere representation, but the performance of a ritual; not innocent handiwork, but the shamanic invocation of power through mimetic inversion.
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The act of creating the police image through fibre was at once an act of submission and subversion. We must think of this practice through the dual lens of discipline and excess. The loom, the frame, the careful repetition of stitch patterns—all these are technologies of the self, of the self-regulating female subject, who enacts, through craft, the codes of postwar propriety. Yet within this disciplinary apparatus lies a crack: the introduction of the ridiculous, the absurd, the ecstatic. The police officer’s imag, becomes a caricature—though not a satirical one. It becomes an object of cult, a fetish, a totem whose meaning oscillates between reverence and rupture.
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What emerges is not a static object but a process, a liturgy of thread, a shamanic invocation where the RCMP officer is disassembled and reconfigured by the very subjects his presence was meant to stabilize. The image, once rendered in fibre, does not simply mirror reality; it reorganizes it. The shaman, as understood anthropologically, is the one who navigates the boundary between the visible and the invisible, the real and the symbolic.In these rural fibre arts, the women became shamans of the domestic sphere, invoking the police officer not to reproduce his authority but to transmute it. What is stitched is not the RCMP constable as he is, but the as he might be, as he fears to be, as he appears in dream or parable.
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He is sometimes adorned with oversized boots, or with wild eyes stitched in contrasting colors—ochre, electric blue. His uniform may be encrusted with ornamental floral motifs, or his horse rendered as half-bird, half-machine. These are not the distortions of an untrained hand; they are the exuberances of the rural imaginary, the manifestation of a society that, though bound by law and land, finds its freedom not in resistance but in ritual elaboration.
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This ritual had no name, no manifesto, no conscious politics. That is precisely its strength. Like all effective mechanisms of discipline, it operated in the realm of the taken-for-granted, the habitual. But in this repetition there emerged a form of subjectivation that exceeds both the docile body and the oppositional subject. The constable, here, is both guardian and ghoul. What we encounter is not simply a textile police officer but a dream-symbol, a figure passing between worlds. We must learn to read it not as a document but as an event, an occurrence where power is not only deployed but played with—where the codes of visual authority are subjected to the ludic logics of craft, where the uniform becomes costume, where law becomes folklore.
The rural subject, in 1960, finds in this fibre figure both a representation of what binds her and a vehicle through which she may, momentarily, escape. This is not critique in the conventional sense; it is more dangerous than critique. It is ritual. To perform a ritual is not to speak about power but to embody its transformations. And this is precisely what the fibre artist of 1960 achieved. She did not merely create art—she created a symbolic order, one where power circulates not vertically not from state to subject but through shared symbols, handled bodies, and the flickering presences of men in blue, reimagined as gods, ghosts, and fools.
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Alternate Spaces
Softening a Hardness:
Feminist Approaches to Post-Euclidian Geometries
Rebecca Taylor, X_665_Femme, Nona Gonzales
Above: 'Well Hung No.5, Burlap, Cariboo Stitching, Nona Gonzales, 2023
To speak of geometry is already to invoke a disciplinary regime—a masculinized matrix of abstraction that produces bodies, forms, and knowledges through repetition, rigidity, and control. Euclidian geometry, with its axiomatic insistence on fixed points, straight lines, and immutable space, constructs an ideal of order that disavows the fluid, the porous, the folded. It is a geometry of the sovereign subject, self-contained and projected outward, colonizing space with logic, measurement, and imperial certainty.​
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But what if the point does not hold? What if the line wavers, bends, or unravels? Fabric-based practices—quilting, weaving, embroidery, dyeing—do not merely offer an alternative; they perform a radical undoing. They render space relational rather than abstract, contingent rather than absolute. The warp and weft of these practices enact a spatial ontology premised not on mastery but on touch, tension, and giving way. This is not to romanticize softness, but to insist upon it as a site of resistance.​
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In these works, geometry is not rejected, but reconfigured—troubled, made to account for the material, embodied labor of hands, of repetition that is not redundant but reparative. Where Euclidian space flattens difference into sameness, fabric insists on variation, on the non-identical iteration. It matters that these practices are historically feminized, domestic, and devalued; it matters also that they endure.
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To critique geometries with thread and textile is not merely to oppose the masculine with the feminine, but to expose the very gendering of knowledge itself. These artists do not sew outside geometry; they stitch within it, against it, beside it. Their work unravels the fantasy of totalizing order and offers, instead, a softened hardness—a rigorous, textured, and necessary opening toward other ways of knowing space, body, and world.
Above: "You call that solid?" Mixed fabric installation, X_665_Femme, 2019
Above: 'Three Nude [Boys] Descending their Staircases', Alpaca Wool, Surgical Thread, Rebecca Taylor, 1998
On Loan from the Pudget Sound Museum of Modern Art :
Animal Baptismal Cloaks
of the Pacific North West
August 1 to November 30, 2025
This exhibition, on loan from the Pudget Sound Museum of Modern Art, is perhaps one of the most controversial projects we have undertaken in recent years. Along with its partner exhibition Animal Baptismals ( see under the category 'Special Exhibions' it ventures into a fraught terrain of historical entanglements, symbolic transpositions, and ritual ambiguity.
To speak of the “Pacific Northwest” is of course already to invoke a geopolitical imaginary shaped by settler-colonial cartographies—an uneven space whose cultural histories have often been rendered through a predominantly U.S.-centric lens. Yet it is precisely in this space of layered narratives and unresolved tensions that the exhibition seeks to intervene.
In the rugged and symbolically rich cultures of the 'Pacific Northwest' during the late 19th century, the convergence of Indigenous cosmology and Christian theology produced artifacts of profound psychological and spiritual significance—none more so than the Animal Baptismal Cloaks displayed in this exhibition.
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These ceremonial garments represent more than aesthetic or anthropological interest; they mark a critical juncture in the development of meaning, where the logos of Christianity met the animistic worldviews of First Nations peoples in an attempt—however fraught—to bring order, hierarchy, and redemption into alignment with the natural world.
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Christianity, with its emphasis on the soul's fall and potential for salvation, introduced the radical notion that not only humans but animals could be seen as spiritual beings in need of moral and metaphysical guidance. In its dual role as non-redeemed counterpart to the human, as mere life (bios) resource to hold dominion over, and as symbolic of the purity of the world before the fall, the animal has been a problematic presence — its semblances to the human always fundamentally scandalous, and hence in need of reinterpretation, or suppression. Are these cloaks (also known as Schabracken, from the Hungarian 'csáprág' meaning saddle cloth) indicators of a culture of celebrating or of subjugating life?
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In the hands of Indigenous artisans, this doctrine was neither passively accepted nor entirely rejected—it was transformed. These cloaks suggest a deep understanding of the sacred responsibilities between humans and animals, mediated through ritual and symbol, where spiritual hierarchy coexists with ecological reciprocity.
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Such artifacts compel us to confront the difficult truth: that meaning is born in the tension between systems, and that spiritual order—even across cultures—requires both discipline and reverence to flourish.
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The baptism of animals—an obscure and controversial practice, often regarded as anomalous within both Christian and Indigenous frameworks—provides a lens through which deeper, more subterranean dynamics of power, belief, and classification can be discerned. Much like the animal trials of late medieval Europe, these rites were not merely curious spectacles but moments of intense symbolic labor: attempts to draw the boundaries of the human, the spiritual, and the rational. They represent a liminal zone between animist recognition and ecclesiastical regulation, between the wild and the ordained.
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The cloaks themselves, gathered here from disparate sources across what colonial discourse has named the Pacific Northwest, function as both textile and text—indexing a process of cultural translation and subjugation, but also resistance. Their animal forms are not costumes; they are thresholds. To clothe a beaver, orca, or raven in baptismal garb is to perform a double gesture: to inscribe the animal into a human sacrament, and to render the sacred absurd—perhaps even uncanny.
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Psychoanalytically, one might read these rites as manifestations of what Freud called the “return of the repressed”—the persistence of animistic logic beneath the surface of monotheistic doctrine. Baptizing an animal does not simply elevate it; it displaces the human subject. Lacan’s mirror stage finds a strange echo here: the animal, in its garb, becomes a distorted reflection, an object through which the human attempts to secure its own symbolic order—but never without a residue of anxiety.
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For First Nations communities, whose cosmologies often include a profoundly different relation to the animal world—one in which kinship, not dominion, is foundational—the Christian rite of baptism can be both an imposition and a site of negotiation. The cloaks stand at this crossroads. They reveal the contested ground where spiritual ontologies meet, merge, and sometimes conflict. They are not neutral artifacts but contested garments, draped in the invisible forces of colonization, conversion, and cultural persistence.
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This exhibition does not attempt resolution. Instead, it opens a space for confrontation, reflection, and critical inquiry. It invites us to consider how rituals—especially those performed upon nonhuman bodies—serve not only theological purposes but also juridical and psychological ones. To baptize an animal is to rewrite the terms of the sacred; to cloak it is to dress an epistemological wound.
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We welcome viewers into this charged dialogue between worldviews, knowing that discomfort is part of the passage. The cloaks, uncanny in their beauty and troubling in their implication, remain as witnesses to the strange, sorrowful, and sometimes sublime entanglement of belief systems and the lives they sought to sanctify—or silence.
[Re]Foregrounding Rural Knowledge Keepers
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