Love Lace & Antiquated Notions Series​

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LOVE LACE, International Lace Award-- Powerhouse Museum, Sydney, Australia

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The 2011 Powerhouse Museum International Lace Award was launched to present a provocative challenge to conventional notions of lace, to inspire new design applications of lace and to attract a diversity of ideas from many global cultures. It called on artists and designers from a broad range of creative disciplines to create ‘an openwork structure whose pattern of spaces is as important as the solid areas’. ​For the exhibition, I made four new pieces taking cue from my Antiquated Notions series. ​I would like to thank the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for their generous support in helping to make this project possible.

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Antiquated Notions are a series of burn-studies that explore the relationships and residual connections we feel to domestic objects of the past. The patterns and forms explored take reference from the knotted and interlaced structures of hand-crocheted doilies. The process of free-motion embroidery and burning are used to intricately render a fabric of negative spaces, as the images are laboriously burned-out and excavated from within the fibre. Comprised of a delicate network of paper and thread, each strand works to interconnect a structure of fibres that weaves notions of the contemporary with the traditional.