More than a lockdown-era craze, the fever for fibre art persists

If you're familiar with the term #rugtok, it's been three years — maybe four — since you first saw an explosion of textile art on your favourite app's "explore" page. In the time that's passed since then, heaps of yarn, embroidery floss and the occasional $300 tufting gun have been relegated to the donation bin of history. Hobbies, especially those born of COVID-era boredom, often fail to stick, and yet as viewers, our appetite for "yarn paintings," custom Pokémon rugs and all manner of fibre-art content has hardly abated. A group exhibition appearing in this year's DesignTO Festival is celebrating that fact, billing itself as a "love letter to textiles."

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."

Artifacts. Adrienna Matzeg, Betty Wood, Aliyah Salmon, Baylee Schmitt, Claudia Gutierrez, Elycia SFA, Laura Carwardine, Yaw Tony. To Jan. 27 at Bulthaup Toronto. www.designto.org