writing

As a maker of cloth, I am fascinated by the myriad ways it entangles cultures, histories and technologies. Cloth is both a sensual object and a textual document. I weave cloth to connect with lineages of weavers who made (and make) for subsistence, for community and for expression. I weave to learn about cloth and to understand the people who have made cloth before me.

I am a descendent of settlers born and raised in Treaty Seven territory. Growing up the queerest kid in several small Alberta towns, my relationship to the places I am from was not always a comfortable one. At the same time, it was the prairie landscape that also gave me a kind of solace - an open space beneath an ever-expanding sky where the wind is strong enough to clear your head and sometimes knock you over. We made a lot of car trips when I was a kid, travelling across the river in my grandmother’s gold 1970’s Pontiac to deliver lunch to my grandfather and uncles during harvest. Off in the distance a thunderstorm is born and swoons across the horizon, flashing silently at first then booming - the gap between telling of its approach or retreat. The air smells of nitrogen, canola and barley. These discrete, encounters with a landscape of unbound vastness still hold a fascination for me, and are entangled with my conception of beauty, nourishing a preference for the sublime, obliterative experience of a sudden thunderstorm.

My work examines cloth as a textual object that enmeshes social histories, ways of thinking and of being. Weaving has led me to consider our co-evolution with plants and animals who provide the materials we use to make cloth and the communities and relationships required to sustain this activity. Intersections between sustainable, regenerative agriculture and making cloth by hand are an ongoing focus in my research. In the studio, I continue to examine the potential for sympoetic reciprocity between fibre-bearing plants, animals and myself, the handweaver who hopes to reveal their innate materiality through collaboration rather than transforming it through mastery.

I sometimes write about textiles and art. Below are a few of these texts. Click the title of each to read.

Artist Statement, written for Drawn exhibition at the Alberta Craft Council Discovery Gallery in Calgary Alberta September 6 to November 1, 2025.

“Weaving at the Horizon: Encounters with Fibre Art on the Canadian Prairie” essay for “Prairie Interlace: Weaving, Modernisms and the Expanded Frame, 1960–2000” edited by Michele Hardy, Julia Krueger and Timoty Long, Published by the Universsity of Calgary Press, 2024

“Embracing Process: A Weaver Collaborates with the Urban Fabric” Article for VAV Magazine, Edited by Tina Ignell, Issue No. 1, 2024

“Weaving People” essay for “Art in Ubiquity: The Handwoven Tea Towel” an exhibition curated by Kim McCollum fort the Alberta Craft Council’s Discovery Gallery in Edmonton, Alberta, April 27-June8, 2019

“When the Studio Becomes Spectacle: a reluctant itinerant weaver talks about the weather in Alberta,” essay for “Crafting Community” in Textile: The Journal of Cloth and Culture, edited by Lisa Vinebaum & Kirsty Robertson, Taylor & Francis (Routledge), UK. Vol 14, Issue 1, pp 74-83

Touching Absence, Exhibition essay for Laura Vickerson‘s The Between at the Nickle Galleries, University of Calgary in 2016 in Calgary, Alberta

Tinctorium, Exhibition essay for Bill Morton’s Tinctorium at Stride Gallery in 2012, Calgary, Alberta

(im)material beauty, excerpt of MFA Thesis statement published in Craft Perception & Practice Vol III, ed. Nisse Gustafson & Amy Gogarty, Ronsdale Press, pp 107-112