Paper Knitting, Wire Skull
I feel like I’m starting to defrost after so much time with myself during quarantine. It started out with me bursting with tense energy. I had just come down from such a challenging year. Fast paced-stressful-chaotic. Maybe a stressful decade ending in a global pandemic. You know, the works. A lot of my recent projects […]
Maps of Transition
Are our personalities just a collection of our routines? Are our personalities ingrained? Do we perform them? We could find little bits and pieces in other people and sew them into ourselves. Maps of transition are reflections on personality, growth, life, lives and changes. Many of the narratives we tell about ourselves are the aspects […]
Growing Forms, Free Standing
Growing Forms Fuzzy and Prickly, Smooth and rough, soft and hard, air and earth. Cacti and plants living in pots with decorative yarn outsides, soft and prickly, smooth and fuzzy. Containing nature through structure and forms. Wool, Soil, Living Plants. 2018
Growing Forms: Hanging
Growing Forms Fuzzy and Prickly, Smooth and rough, soft and hard, air and earth. Cacti living in textile and soil pods, watered through the permeable layer of crochet wool containing roots and soil. Containing nature through structure and forms. Wool, Soil, Living Plants. 2018
It Washes Through
We have routines and rhythms to our lives that are affected by our upbringing, our jobs, our partners and friends, our health. These rhythms can help us to grow and flourish when they’re nourishing. They can also create toxic patterns that we repeat because they’re familiar and comfortable. A cactus has adapted to a sparse, […]
Change is Inevitable, Tides are Inevitable: Making It Washes Through
You can’t control how events will change you, just that events will change you. I’ve been making work about grief, trauma and closure, but really I’ve been making work about change. Changes shock us, they rattle us. Loss is change. We don’t always know how to deal with these changes. I’ve changed through doing my […]
Calm
I’m sorry I didn’t check in enough when it happened. I was still learning to support people. How do you record the weight a person has on a life, and the weight they have after they’re gone? How do you learn who someone is by what they left behind? In memory.
Words Cut to Slivers, Soften.
It all began with a journal. Or two journals, to be more exact. It all starts with minimalism. I love the idea of minimalism and letting go of the things you don’t use, but sometimes it doesn’t jive with making things. My sad journals. These journals hurt. They feel like a dull hollowness. They suck […]
It Washes Over
It Washes Over explores experiences through the objects we hold onto, and how the experiences they represent change us. Using donated items of significance that carry memories, grief, and trauma, I ventured into the inner workings of heartbreak and back again. This exploration of physical and emotional experiences as an unraveling and reworking of self weaves […]
Loving You Hurt More, A Process in a Process
I made this piece a full year ago and still haven’t published this post. It has been sitting in my draft folder, sometimes with writing in it, and sometimes without. I think it’s always easier to talk about someone else’s story than to talk about your own, and if I had the right words I […]
Dedicated to
I have had this book for my Heartbreak Objects series for a long time. It was the first donated object I had received, and it was a heavy one. In his early 30s he had the realization that he was bisexual, and his family was not accepting of his sexual identity. His niece (who was […]
The Process of Closure
I work with objects that break people’s hearts but that they’ve held onto because of sentimental value. I take them apart and transforming them into something new that represents their experiences. The long processes and labour are like the process of grief or moving on; it takes time and sometimes we want to rush past […]
Heartbreak Object: Wedding Bands
We like to pretend we can have a person forever. We are fallible creatures who grow and change, and eventually cease to exist. I was given these wedding bands as a generous contribution to my project Investigations of Heartbreak and Grief. Wedding bands are culturally one of the biggest signifiers of commitment and often that’s […]
Heartbreak Object: Taboos, then, have an all-encompassing quality
I was donated the book Anal Pleasure and Health by Jack Morin as part of my project An Investigation of Heartbreak and Grief. The owner of the book met me for coffee and we talked about the symbolism of this book in his life, and why it’s important to him. In his early 30s he had […]
Heartbreak Objects: Tokens From a Past Place
I received a big box in the mail. Part of an office chair box covered in duct tape. Inside was a stuffed animal, a beeswax candle, a David Bowie Ziggy Stardust Record, and a long letter about a series of uncomfortable and emotionally exploitative relationships…. ending with this one. The remaining objects had been poking […]
Love Isn’t About Becoming, it is Being
Carlene Kurdziel donated a pair of snow boots to my heartbreak project. It was my first donated object, and a doozie. The glue that holds snowboard boots together is pervasive, and there is stitching on top of it. I had to slice through the stitching with an exacto knife and then muscle the glue apart. Carlene […]
Structure and Movement
Structure and Movement is a series experimenting with freedom, movement and cooperation. The structure of the weaving allows movements to be amplified and transforms spaces and people. The Wool Fish An interactive and cooperative installation. Participants worked together to manipulate the hanging pieces by pulling on the strings along the perimeter and making twenty-six different sections […]
Sad Journals, New Form
I’ve been working on a new use for my (sad) journals. They feel too special to throw out but I don’t want them sitting on my shelf. I found a way to spin them into yarn(ish) material, and I’m reading through and slowly making them into something new. It’s so relaxing and cathartic to cut […]
The Wool Fish- Rainbow Trout Music Festival, St Malo MB
‘The Wool Fish’ at Rainbow Trout Music Festival, St Malo MB. This interactive textile piece was built under a canopy with a pully system. Participants could pull on any of the strings handing down from the outside, and 26 different areas of the puppets will move up and down depending on which strings were selected. […]
Social Climates
What a busy winter I’ve had making work. There is a stressful social climate happening right now, with elections (Canadian Federal Election this fall and the US Presidential Race happening right now) and the refugee crisis really highlighting how far we need to come with human rights and prejudice. I had an overwhelming urge to […]
Stretch Marks: I Look Like I’ve Been Mauled by a Bear
Cotton Thread on Lycra Body Suit, shown in “Best” at the C2 Centre for Craft
Bigger Puppet
Fabric Puppet Linen and Hand Spun Wool Yarn Made with tablet weaving Photos by Becky Gartner
Katrina Craig 