That show — Artifacts — is up until Jan. 27 at Bulthaup Toronto. It’s an unusual venue; the space doubles as a showroom for ultra-modern kitchen furnishings, which lends a high-contrast backdrop to the exhibition’s modest collection of fuzzy wall hangings. And it’s an eclectic variety of selected work, illustrating just how diverse the art form can be.
Curated by Adrienna Matzeg and Betty Wood, Artifacts highlights a wide range of techniques, including weaving, embroidery and (abstract) macramé. Using crochet, American artist Baylee Schmitt has replicated a cupboard from her childhood home — a 2D trompe l’oeil that hangs from the ceiling, dripping with yarn.
Locals Laura Carwardine and Yaw Tony both take inspiration from architectural forms. Tony’s piece is a vibrantly patterned velvet wall hanging, reminiscent of an Hermès scarf; Carwardine is fascinated by the coded visuals of architectural drawings: the stripes, dots and squiggles that stand in for things like brick and concrete and insulation. These hidden patterns appear as embroidered designs, stitched through a sheet of plywood using neon nylon rope.
Co-curators Matzeg and Wood have long admired the work of the artists they’ve assembled. Wood is a design journalist by trade, and she’s followed several of the participants’ careers, while Matzeg is employed as an industrial designer — as are some of the other folks included in the show. Like them, the curators have cultivated art practices on the side, and both have new works appearing in the exhibition.
The curators first met at Wood’s debut solo exhibition last spring (Still, Life – the spaces I remember) and quickly discovered they had much in common. Both share an affinity for punch needle, and like many hobbyists, they discovered the medium in the earliest days of COVID-19. Back then, Matzeg was newly out of work, itching to busy her hands and mind, and punch needle became the solution. For Wood, the art form was a means of managing lockdown anxiety, while staying connected to her roots. Based in Toronto, the artist is originally from the North East of England, an area with a long heritage of mat making. (“It’s what you’d call a ‘rag rug’ over here,” she says.)
“One of the really thrilling things about this medium is that it removes the anxiety of creating,” says Wood. If a stitch doesn’t match your vision, you can simply yank it out and start over.
“It’s like drawing. It’s so expressive,” says Matzeg, who delights at the range of tones she can capture with thread.
Since 2020, the pastime has flourished into a part-time art practice for them both. Matzeg, who studied photography at NSCAD University, often uses travel photos as a reference for her meditations on architecture and memory, whereas Wood is more focused on capturing domestic scenes, creating illustrative tapestries of unassuming interiors, like the home she shares with her wife. They’re cozy glimpses of an ordinary but blissful private life, and for Artifacts, she’s paired one such tableau, Settling in (monstera in the kitchen), with a scene from Guild Park and Gardens in Scarborough, where the ruins and remnants of many great Toronto buildings have been artfully lain to rest.
“One of the things I find really striking about Toronto is that it has such a quickness to demolish heritage buildings,” says Wood. “This idea that we don’t preserve interiors, that runs through a lot of my work. I draw a lot of interior spaces that are transient or lost or personal.”
Like Wood, Matzeg is also keenly interested in the memories we build around a place. “My practice is really focused on nostalgia,” she says, “and this feeling we have of trying to get back the feeling or the moments that are gone.” To that end, the new works she’s included in Artifacts are travel souvenirs of sorts — architectural details meant to channel memories of Portugal.
Textile art lends itself well to stories about nostalgia, according to Matzeg. The texture of the thread is a nod to the fuzziness of memory, she says. “It gives a blurry edge to these things that you can’t grasp. You can’t see them as clearly as when you were there.”
And yet, there’s something undeniably contemporary about the medium. Even though traditional textile crafts go back hundreds and thousands of years, they suddenly feel fresh.
“A lot of them have become lost and are finding their way back to the surface again through new practitioners or new versions,” says Wood. “This is what’s interesting for me, and I think it’s interesting for a lot of people: we’re finally realizing that the gatekeeping around what has value — what is viewed as art — the value of that is changing and shifting. And I think it’s long overdue.”
LONDON (AP) — With a few daubs of a paintbrush, the Brontë sisters have got their dots back.
More than eight decades after it was installed, a memorial to the three 19th-century sibling novelists in London’s Westminster Abbey was amended Thursday to restore the diaereses – the two dots over the e in their surname.
The dots — which indicate that the name is pronounced “brontay” rather than “bront” — were omitted when the stone tablet commemorating Charlotte, Emily and Anne was erected in the abbey’s Poets’ Corner in October 1939, just after the outbreak of World War II.
They were restored after Brontë historian Sharon Wright, editor of the Brontë Society Gazette, raised the issue with Dean of Westminster David Hoyle. The abbey asked its stonemason to tap in the dots and its conservator to paint them.
“There’s no paper record for anyone complaining about this or mentioning this, so I just wanted to put it right, really,” Wright said. “These three Yorkshire women deserve their place here, but they also deserve to have their name spelled correctly.”
It’s believed the writers’ Irish father Patrick changed the spelling of his surname from Brunty or Prunty when he went to university in England.
Raised on the wild Yorkshire moors, all three sisters died before they were 40, leaving enduring novels including Charlotte’s “Jane Eyre,” Emily’s “Wuthering Heights” and Anne’s “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.”
Rebecca Yorke, director of the Brontë Society, welcomed the restoration.
“As the Brontës and their work are loved and respected all over the world, it’s entirely appropriate that their name is spelled correctly on their memorial,” she said.
