Piecework

Alice Olsen Williams is a renowned textile artist, blending expressions of Anishinaabe beliefs and ideology with reflections on contemporary social issues. She completed her BA at Trent University and, with her discovery of the quilting process in 1980, went on to formulate the concepts that have become the basis for her distinctive style.

Alice’s works have been exhibited at the National Museum of the American Indian (Smithsonian), Michigan State University, Thunder Bay Art Gallery, Wanuskewin Heritage Park, the Art Gallery of Peterborough, and many other museums and art galleries.

Alicia Barbieri is an interdisciplinary artist from Southern Alberta. Her work expands into photography, textile, performance, video, and installation. She holds a BFA in Studio Art from the University of Lethbridge and an MFA from the University of Guelph. Alicia is interested in the blurred line between health and beauty and aims to dissect objectification in the current medical–industrial complex. Driven by her experiences with Wildervanck Syndrome, a congenital condition that has led to chronic pain, she considers the intangible wholeness of cure.

Colleen Heslin is an artist and independent curator based in Vancouver. She has an MFA from Concordia University, Montreal, and a BFA from Emily Carr University, Vancouver. Her work explores medium crossovers between painting, sculpture, fibers, and photography. Heslin was the winner of the 2013 RBC Painting Competition and her work has been exhibited and published in Canada, the USA, and Europe. She founded The Crying Room Projects (1999–2014), which provided an open platform for emerging contemporary art in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.

Hangama Amiri is an Afghan Canadian feminist artist who works in painting, textiles, and video, weaving together stories based on memories of her homeland and her diasporic experience. She holds an MFA from Yale University, where she graduated in 2020 from the Painting and Printmaking Department. She received her BFA from NSCAD University, and was a Canadian Fulbright and Post-Graduate Fellow at Yale University School of Art and Sciences (2015–2016).

Jagdeep Raina is currently a Fellow at the Core Program, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, and was previously a Paul Mellon Fellow at Yale University, a recipient of the 2020 Sobey Art Award, and a resident at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. He received his BFA from Western University in 2013, and his MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2016. He has exhibited extensively both internationally and across Canada.

Jeremy Laing makes objects, spaces, and situations for embodiment and relation. Through the synthesis of craft, conceptual, and social modes, their work explores the interrelation and transitional potential of people and things, materials and meanings, and questions the normative logics of who and what matters is valued, or not.

Joyce Wieland (1930–1998) began her career as a painter in Toronto before moving to New York in 1962, where she soon achieved renown as an experimental filmmaker. The 1960s and 1970s were productive years for Wieland, as she explored various materials and media and as her art became assertively political, engaging with nationalism, feminism, and ecology. She returned to Toronto in 1971. In 1987, the Art Gallery of Ontario held a retrospective of her work. Wieland was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in the 1990s, and she died in 1998.

Judith Tinkl has been a fiber artist for over forty years and a freelance teacher, exhibit organizer, and a volunteer. Actively exhibiting since 1982, Judith became a faculty member at the Ontario College of Art in 1990 and was subsequently an Assistant Dean for eight years, and then Associate Professor, retiring in 2009. She has exhibited extensively across North America and runs Tinkl’s Gallery with her family out of her home in Sunderland, Ontario.

Moraa Stump is a Kenyan Canadian artist and maker. Using textile techniques, Stump’s practice repurposes mixed media and materials to make 2D images and soft sculptures. Moraa’s work seeks to widen the scope of possibility and imagination when confronting the themes of race, physical space, and safety. Having grown up in Tanzania, Mozambique, and Swaziland, Stump moved to Toronto 10 years ago. This marked the beginning of her adulthood, and her relationship to a Black identity. Relearning and contextualizing herself to a North American lens has been a constant source of inspiration and questioning that fuels and excites her work.

Preston Pavlis’s work on canvas and fabric represents his interest in the fusion of painting and textiles as a means to explore narrative, form, and colour. Focused on poetic association and metaphor, the resulting works in oil, embroidery, and collage are personal charts for time and memory. Preston has exhibited across North America and currently lives in Halifax, where he is completing his studies at the Nova Scotia College of Arts and Design.

Leila Timmins is the Senior Curator at The Robert McLaughlin Gallery in Oshawa, Ontario.

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