WHOLENESS

It's been a very exciting year thus far, starting with having my tapestry "Joy" accepted into the American Tapestry Bienniale which took the tapestry to the American Textile Museum in Lowell Massachusetts and the Elder Gallery in Lincoln Nebraska. I taught a Creativity and Designing for Fabric weaving workshop to the Niagara Guild of Spinners and Weavers and had a wonderful time with them. I taught a weekend course on tapestry through the Ontario Handweavers and Spinners at Georgian College, and it was wonderful for me as a teacher to be able to focus only on teaching tapestry, when usually, I'm teaching a variety of weaving structures besides tapestry weaving. All this while I celebrate my 15th year teaching weaving, and 25th being an artist, fibre artist and weaver.

Presently I am working on preparing for a solo exhibition of my tapestries and fibre related work, entitled WHOLENESS and it will take place at the Gibson Centre for Community, Arts & Culture in Alliston http://www.gibsoncentre.com/ which will open September 1 and close September 26 2011. The opening reception will be Sunday September 11 between 2 -5 pm.

This exhibition will be in conjunction with the official commencement of an Artist in the Community Project for which I received a grant from the Ontario Arts Council to collaborate with the Nottawasaga Handweavers and Spinners Guild in creating 12 community tapestries.

Why the title, WHOLENESS. Over a lifetime, many of us seek it and this journey makes for an interesting, more engaged life. We all come from many different backgrounds, each of us facing the challenges that our family of origins may have presented to us, and this foundation sets us on our path, and motivates our choices in life. Most of us, myself included, seek to be the most and best of who we are, and we can only be as good as the circumstances, opportunities and environment will permit. We all must contend with the limitations and constraints that life and others may place upon us, and somehow find a way to be whole and to be fulfilled. Through our passages, we feel a range of emotions and my tapestries and fibre work is mainly about giving visual imagery to these very same emotions. To find Wholeness, we need to be in touch with ourselves, with who we are, and certainly with others.