Labour's Erasure

This work was done in an independent course with the patient supervision of Concordia professor Kelly Thompson.
I printed images of my body (the weaver) onto the warp threads that were almost 14 feet long, and then wove this piece of cotton at 40 threads per inch in a shibori weaving pattern.

I then, taking the fully woven work off the loom, pulled the shibori resist threads as tightly as possible, and dipped the entire work into a vat of indigo.

Initially I was disappointed with the result, as so much of the image that I had been so careful maintain intact as the loom was dressed and the piece was woven, disappeared once the piece was dyed. The mercerized cotton lost much of its luster as well, once dipped in the indigo.

The piece was made to speak to the invisibility of those who labour in the making of most of the textiles adorning our daily lives. Anonymity is often cited for textiles viewed in museums, and the modern day creators of many of our commodities are anonymous to us, further alienating the modes of production and consumption, the maker from the consumer. I believe this alienation has a huge part to play in the apathy of much of the developed world towards a system of modes of production that oppress and repress a large number of the majority world's population.

I wanted to create a hand-woven piece where the body whose labor went into its creation was present -just barely there, but never absent from the fabric itself. This piece of cotton will always bear the trace of its creator's image.

Paper Collage

Tomorrow I will give a workshop on making collages with Au papier japonais' washi paper. Should be fun. Here are some samples I made...

A wedding dress

A friend of mine was recently married, and asked me to make the dress. Here she is, in it.

A shirt made with shibori cotton

A friend of mine, José Manuel St-Jacques of UNTTLD, made a beautiful shirt with some fabric I died using the arashi shibori technique.

Shibori Dyed Silks

A sculpture and cyanotypes

I came upon a package of old rusted heddles, from a loom at one point, and held onto them knowing I wanted to tie them together with very fragile thread. Turns out the thread had to be gold, and reinforced with wire in order to hold.

This sculpture was presented with other graduating fibres students in an exhibit at Montréal's Eastern Bloc Gallery.

I then used this sculpture to make some very unique cotton and silk fabrics, using the process cyanotype. I will repeat this soon, just need a trip to American Chemicals and a sunny day...

Home on the Range

Home on the Range

Home on the Range

These were ribbons upon which I printed troubling and disturbing narratives of children who spent time in Residential Schools, or facts about these “schools” themselves. They appear to have been more like torture camps, than schools. One fact that may serve to relinquish any beliefs you hold that the crown of Canada treats its indigenous peoples well these days, or that colonial practices are a thing of the past, is that the last of these schools closed down in the late 1990's.

Home on the Range

These works are silkscreen maps onto fabric, some of which I died previous to printing upon them. They were both exploring geographic mapping, which represents rivers and mountain ranges, the true land itself, instead of political and arbitrary borders.