Hard Twist Participants
George-Ann Bowers www.gabowers.com
Berkeley, California textile artist George-Ann Bowers has created woven artwork for exhibition and commission for over 25 years, showing her nature-based weavings in venues throughout the United States as well as internationally. She has completed artist residencies at US National Parks in Oregon, Arizona and Maine, and her work is represented in several public and private collections.
Kate Busby www.kateb.ca
Kate Busby is a graduate of the Crafts and Design Program at Sheridan College, and also holds an Honours B.A. from the University of Toronto with a specialist in Visual Studies and a major in Art History. Kate currently works out of The Contemporary Textile Studio Co-operative in Toronto, and was one of the founding members of the co-op. Kate owns and operates kate B. Textile Design, creating interior based work for both retail and gallery exhibition.
Maggie Butterfield Dickinson www.mabudi.com
Maggie has been a professional actor, quilter and photographer for over 30 years. Much of her inspiration is drawn from landscape, farm and nature. The source for the thread paintings in this show is her Toronto Beach garden that lures the insects and animals to be photographed.
Robert Davidovitz
Robert Davidovitz is Toronto based artist who received his B.A. in Visual Arts from York University in 2007. Since then, he has been exhibiting his work on a local and national level. His woven paintings have been shown at Hard Twist / New Twist – 4th Annual Juried Textile Exhibition at the Gladstone Hotel, the biennial 2009 Juried Exhibition at the Thames Art Gallery in Chatham Ontario, and Oakville’s 2009 World of Threads Festival exhibition.
Holly Gabel www.hollygabel.wordpress.com/gallery
Holly Gabel is an emerging artist and recent graduate of the Brock University Visual Arts program. Her work is primarily textile based and rooted in her strong family history of working with fabrics. She experiments and plays with materials that are tied to her childhood, including textiles, found objects and imagery from children’s books.
Sarah Gotowka www.youtube.com/user/saagoogoo
Sarah Gotowka was born in South Korea in 1984, and grew up in the suburbs of Rochester, New York, where she spent her childhood memorizing R&B songs. She received her BFA in Fiber from the Cleveland Institute of Art and is now a seeking her MFA degree at Concordia University.
Miriam Grenville miriamgrenville.blogspot.com
Miriam Grenville graduated from the Ontario College of Art in 1987. Her company produces designs for the wall covering and textile industry often printed in large format process using digital technology. Combining traditional textile motifs with text and objects, Miriam’s works are used as decorative applications or as stand-alone pieces. She is looking forward to exhibiting her ”money for buying other people’s art” at the designboom mart at the ICFF in New York, in May 2011. Recently, her work has been seen at City of Craft, the Gladstone Hotel’s 2010 pieceWORK show, and the 2010 Interior Design Show in the Studio North area.
Philip Hare www.philiphare.com
Philip has been working primarily with textiles since 2005. For the past three years he has become increasingly interested in installations involving textiles. In 2009 he mounted “Towel Hag”, a performance installation at offthemapgallery and in 2010, “Sweat Lounge” at Propeller Centre.
Peter Hiers www.peterhiers.com
Peter Hiers has been represented by galleries since 1986 and has exhibited internationally in 10 states and in over 15 California cities. He is represented by The Ernesto Mayans Gallery in Santa Fe, NM, and the Carmel Art Association, Carmel, CA. He has shown at the National Art Museum of China, Grounds for Sculpture in Hamilton, NJ, the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art and has spoken about his work at numerous exhibitions.
Anna Kuchel Rabinowitz www.annakuchelrabinowitz.com
Anna is an artist living and working in New York City. Working mainly in sculpture, she likes to explore the shapes, movement and energy of the human body in cloth, clay, plaster, wax and bronze. Her works draw connections between the image and a narrative.
Ariane Lavoie www.elizabethetariane.com
Ariane Lavoie lives and works in Montreal. She is a multidisciplinary artist who uses sculpture, painting, in situ installation, fibres, textile and video. She is inspired by the nature of life, the human being. Her approach begins with the questioning of self-identity to the relations that bind individuals together and help them to communicate. She also explores senses. Currently she is completing a BFA at Concordia University.
Laura MacAulay lauramacaulay.wordpress.com
Laura MacAulay was born in 1986 in Ottawa. She studied design and studio arts at Concordia University in Montreal, earning a BFA in 2009. Her current practice is based in drawing, watercolour, and fibres, and explores plant, animal, and word morphology. She views her art-making process as extra-logical communication that is rooted in her body. Her work is in part influenced by West African dance, which she has been studying since 2006.
Meghan Macdonald www.meghan-macdonald.com
Meghan Macdonald is an emerging artist working primarily in textiles. Currently enrolled in the BFA Textiles Interdisciplinary program at NSCAD University, she is a recent gradate from Crafts & Design at Sheridan College. She is interested in exploring themes of collections, memory and the found object
John Paul Morabito www.johnpaulmorabito.com
Artist John Paul Morabito hand weaves and deconstructs cloth. Employing ritualistic methods of making and unmaking his works marry the creative with the destructive and seek to find meaning in the act and the artifact. His work has been exhibited throughout the United States and has been reviewed in publications such as Fiberarts Magazine and American Craft. He holds a BFA in Fibers from the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, MD.
Shawna Munro www.shawnamunro.com
Shawna Munro was born in Windsor, Ontario. She completed her BFA at the University of Windsor in 2009 and has recently completed her first year in the MFA program at the University of Manitoba. Shawna enjoys working with traditional crafts and juxtaposing them with humorous, often sexual content.
Hitoko Okada www.hitokoo.com
Hitoko Okada is a Hamilton-based fashion artist. She has worked as a costumer in theaters across Southern Ontario including The Stratford Festival, The Grand Theatre in London and Mirvish Productions in Toronto. Okada holds a Fashion Design Diploma from the International Academy of Design and Technology in Toronto and an Arts and Sciences Diploma from Langara College in Vancouver BC. A past member of A Collection of Foreign Objects, the artist’s work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions in festivals such as Luminato and Nuit Blanche in Toronto, Illuminares in Vancouver and in venues such as the Harbourfront Gallery; The Department Gallery in Toronto; and The Print Studio in Hamilton.
David Ross www.davidpaulross.blogspot.com/2011/04/3d-sewing.html
David Ross is a Montreal based artist. He obtained a BFA from Concordia University in Montreal, an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and completed an internship at apexart curatorial program in New York. His multidisciplinary work has been exhibited in Canada, the United States and Japan. Ross has also been involved with arts as a curator and a writer.
Rachael Speirs www.rachaelspeirs.com
The artwork of Rachael Speirs uses unconventional materials and plays with texture and imagery without restraint. Her fine art pieces are entirely made up of scrap fabrics textiles and embroidery. As self-taught artist, she enjoys creating folk tale inspired images where meanings shift depending on the viewer’s experience. This forces the viewer to dust off the cobwebs of their imagination, embrace puzzlement and enter into a childlike frame of mind, where some things happen ‘just because’.
Keiley Stewart www.leikey.com
Keiley Stewart is a Canadian textiles artist and graduate of the Craft & Design program at Sheridan College. Her artistic focus is in felting; exploring the versatility of raw wool. Keiley combines her skills in felting with a genuine concept of fear, of social and emotional anxieties, and transforms them into wearable dimensional forms. With an ingrained sense of optimism, her work often reflects a humorous tone that mirrors her own sensibility.
Barbara Sutherland http://web.me.com/kitka.bas/Sutherland/home.html
Barbara Sutherland is an MFA graduate from NSCAD University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. She has been an instructor in the Fibre Department at the Alberta College of Art and Design and has received numerous awards including a SSRHC Graduate Scholarship and a Governor General’s Academic Medal. Her work has been exhibited across Canada, in Europe and Australia and she has worked in collaboration with other artists and composers
Allison Tunis www.allisontunis.wordpress.com
Allison Tunis is a Bachelor of Fine Arts graduate from the University of Alberta. She works exclusively in cross-stitch and fiber arts. Her work questions society’s obsession with body image and female stereotypes, while exploring her own struggle with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and body image. She has had her work featured in a number of media articles, and will be featured in the book Hoopla: The Art of Unexpected Embroidery, by Leanne Prain in Fall 2011.
W Collective www.wcollective.com
Hoi Yee Wong was born and raised in Hong Kong. Wong attended OCAD (Ontario College of Art & Design) and graduated with a “Friends of Fibre” award in 2002. Her work has been in invitational and juried group shows in Canada and internationally.
Ko Park earned her BDes in Jewellery and Metalsmithing from Ontario College of Art & Design in 2005. Park started her career in fashion jewellery industry in Toronto as a design assistant and now runs her own business. Her work has been in invitational and juried group shows in Canada and internationally.
Martina Edmondson was born and raised in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Edmondson graduated from the Material Art & Design Program at the Ontario College of Art and Design (OCAD) in 2002 with honours in Fibre. Her work has been in invitational and juried group shows in Canada and internationally.
Vanessa Li was born and raised in Hong Kong. Li attained her post secondary education in the Material Art & Design Program at the Ontario College of Art and Design (OCAD) in 2002. Her work has been in invitational and juried group shows in Canada and internationally.
Wan Ki An is an active fibre artist and rug designer who holds a BFA degree from South Korea and a Diploma in Fibre Art from Ontario College of Art & Design (OCAD). As a fibre artist she received an Exhibition Assistance Grant and a Craft Artist Grant from the Ontario Crafts Council. She was also awarded the Kingscraft/Lady Flavelle Award and Mary Diamond Butts Award in Embroidery through the Ontario Crafts Council. She has participated in juried exhibitions and received the Yarns Plus Award from Ontario Handweavers & Spinner Guild and Juror’s Award from Society of Canadian Artists.
Sarah Waldman-Engel
Sarah Waldman-Engel studied Fine Arts at Centennial College, graduating in April of 2010. Drawing on this background, she approaches her textile work from a painterly perspective. She fell in love with textiles during the summer of 2009 when she taught herself to crochet (with assistance from her Grandmother). She has taken part in a number of group shows, including Hard Twist 5, and a collaborative installation at Gallery 1313.
Jennie Wood www.jenniewoodesigns.com
With a background in exhibition design, Jennie lectured before moving to Hong Kong where she was introduced to patchwork and quilting. On returning to the UK, Jennie completed City & Guilds Patchwork and Quilting, taught quilting part-time and is now a member of the Quilters’ Guild of the British Isles and the Contemporary Quilt Group. She has exhibited at international quilt exhibitions, the national quilt museum in York, UK and more recently in Toronto and Ontario.
Erin Wootten www.erinwootten.com
Erin Wootten recently received her BFA from Savannah College of Art and Design. Using mostly silk, wool, cotton, glass beads and metal, her pieces evoke a feminine fragility despite their actual solid construction. The softer matter represents the inherent delicacy and vulnerable nature of femininity, while the metal subsists purely to give form, structure, and stricter boundaries. Referencing suggested wear and the un-wearable, Erin’s pieces bring forth female issues with self-control, obsession, and obstruction.
Nancy Yule www.nancyyule.com
Nancy has been working with fabric and fibre almost all her life, working her way from clothing to quilts. During her quilting period she started to realize that there should be no rules in her work and she started experimenting. Anything and everything that will take a needle is fair game. Today her work ranges from exhibition pieces to functional items and fashion accessories.
