Textile artists weave innovative new visions at Eastside Culture Crawl

Blending technology, sustainability, and old hand traditions, lines by Loudly Insecure, FELT à la main with LOVE, and Nico Gruzling explore new frontiers in fibre art

Chantal Cardinal and her *100 Coquelicots*.

Candice Weber’s *Lockdown Garden* (detail).

The Eastside Culture Crawl runs November 17 to 20

WHETHER IT’S TEXTURAL throws exploding with abstract tufts of curly sheep’s wool or a dress whose collar of beaded polygons echoes the glitching of 3-D animation software, textile art is pushing into innovative new frontiers at this year’s Eastside Culture Crawl.

To be succinct: this isn’t your grandma’s needlepoint or weaving loom—even though many of the most exciting fibre artists showing work at this weekend’s massive open-studio event draw on age-old techniques. But they’re also as likely to pull inspiration from computer coding, abstract art, or 3-D animation.

Stir spoke to three of the Crawl’s textile mavericks—and scroll to the end of the article for a bunch more people wielding needles, threads, and fibres in new ways.

Loudly Insecure

Candice Weber

Gore Studio (617 Gore Avenue)

Indiana-born artist Candice Weber’s “day job” is animation, meaning she’s well-versed in the technical realm of digital art. That skill set mixes in cool new ways with the hand embroidery techniques she uses in her spectacular art and wearable-art pieces, which often resemble wild, undulating topographies of colourful beading, stitching, and buttons.

When she first discovered the possibilities of embroidery, she delved into fine art courses, artist residencies, and volunteer work in maker spaces, melding that training with jewellery design, laser cutting, CNC guided embroidery, weaving, and beading to develop her craft.

“I had always done a lot of art, but I feel like I really found my medium when I started doing that, because there are no limits,” she tells Stir. “The way my brain works is that if I have a material, I say, ‘How can I use it in a way that is more unique?’ I think I’m always trying to find a new way to do something. A lot of it is a desire to make something more 3-D, and I’m obviously really attracted to colour and pattern.”

Take her Glitch dress, submitted for London’s Hand & Lock Prize for Embroidery. Its collar bursts up in woolly clouds that hold an array of screaming-green polygons, each built from small triangular looms and painstakingly beaded, woven, and stitched together. “Something that would happen when I was doing 3-D work in college was you'd get these weird polygon things when you were doing dynamics,” she relates. “So I was trying to do a physical re-creation of that to a degree with the dress. Basically a 3-D model uses many triangles to make more complex shapes, so that’s one that comes from a background in doing animation and digital art.”

The *Fruiting Bodies and Their Threads* jacket; modelling and makeup by Rose Butch. Photo by Candice Weber

Elsewhere, her Fruiting Bodies and Their Threads jacket (also submitted to Hand & Lock) finds multicoloured layers of beadwork rippling down its arms. Though it looks somewhat sci-fi, its inspiration is the natural world, growing out of Weber’s fascination with fungi, mushrooms, and the science of mycelium—especially her discovery that mushrooms are really the “fruiting bodies” of the complex mycelium networks that run underground. “And I really love the look of a log when mushrooms go up the side,” she adds. She says it took her six months to make, building the layers with felted forms that she then embroidered with beads.

At the Crawl you’ll find other wearable pieces, as well as intricate smaller artworks (some in traditional embroidery hoops), largely crafted from buttons and beads Weber’s mother helps her to source.

“I do purchase some of it, and a lot of it is repurposed, but a very nice thing is that my mom also has a small business where goes to auctions,” Weber says. “She resells things on eBay, but she also comes across a lot of yarn and a lot of beads. I’ve probably gotten about 20 tonnes of beads just from my mom. So I guess that’s also my secret to success: my mom is constantly on the lookout for me.”

FELT à la main with LOVE

Chantal Cardinal

Arts Factory (281 Industrial Avenue)

Fans who have visited felt artist Chantal Cardinal’s studio over the years will see a distinct evolution of her work at this year’s Crawl. The former film-industry fashion designer and costumer is drawn ever more to the natural beauty of wool—particularly the lustrous, silver-grey, curly masses from Sweden’s Gotland sheep (sourced from a farm on Barnston Island, where she attends the shearing process a few times a year).

“I’m going a little bit more natural; I’m trying to showcase the natural wool instead of hiding it in felting that looks too perfect or too commercial,” says the artist. “I want to show this came from a wool fibre—that I didn't just press this together.”

Recent mini sheep throws, from FELT à la main with LOVE’s Instagram.

New works at this year’s Crawl include small throws whose tight curls and exploding tufts of grey, white, and black wool—with accent hits of dark fuchsia—make them look like gorgeously textural abstract artworks. (The artist suggests throwing them over the back of a chair or couch, or hanging them from a wall.)

Elsewhere, she mixes those wild and woolly collages with punches of gold or rust; in one “Gold Coast Series” diptych, warm-yellow curls burst forth from smooth masses of natural white and black.

But that’s just the beginning of work that can range from the wearable to decor to pure artistic expression; over recent months, Cardinal has worked her magic with felt to build elaborate felt flower installations (100 Coquelicots), upholster vintage chairs, fashion otherworldly light fixtures, and craft wall hangings that resemble beautifully withered grey peonies or abstracted birch trunks.

No wonder she refers to her practice as “painting with fibre”.

“Wet felting is water, wool, and a little–actually a lot!—of agitation,” she explains. “And it’s a simple principle. But where you can go with that is just endless, and every time I work with it I just get more and more motivated. I just get more and more inspired; one piece leads to the next that leads to the next.”

Nico Gruzling

Sunrise Studios (1115 East Hastings Street)

Fibre artist Nico Gruzling is pulling together the far-flung touchpoints of her career in a beautiful line of statement pieces with laser-cut designs. Looking at the shawls, dresses, and scarves with their delicate and precise cutout patterns—honeycomblike hexagons, seas of circles, or tiny snowflake crystals—you wouldn’t instantly guess the road that brought her here. But it’s clear she brings a mix of art and technological knowledge to her work that makes it utterly unique.

Gruzling has her masters in computer science. She didn’t learn about laser-cutting technology until later, when she stepped in to help her late marine-engineer father, who ran a family business manufacturing tug boat parts. He had cancer at the time.

“I ran the company for seven years and I taught myself CAD [computer-aided design] and often, for fun, did artworks with it,” Gruzling explains to Stir. “My dad’s blueprints were kind of beautiful. I always loved to make my designs look as nice as my dad’s.

“Laser-cutting was pretty new when I was manufacturing boat parts—it was so fascinating to me because we were plasma-cutting the boat parts before that,” she continues. “So I was laser-cutting half-inch steel and it was way more precise than plasma-cutting.”

Fast-forward through the years and Gruzling sold the business, had a family of her own, and started looking for new career options. She’d taken some sewing classes and decided to pursue fashion design full-time at Vancouver Community College downtown. But even there, her love of technology came back into play.

“When I started at fashion school, I used [the drafting software] AutoCAD to do my pattern drafting,” she says. “That is really unusual—most people draft by hand, then you digitize it.

“The funny thing is, looking back, when I was 10 or 12 my dad would get me to digitize his drawings for him,” she adds.

Working out of her Hastings studio today, Gruzling has come full circle, returning to laser cutting—this time on eco-conscious fabrics. Some of the cutouts reveal skin or whatever you wear underneath the shawls and other pieces; others, like her scarves, are double layered, so the cutout reveals a colour underneath. (Her favourite combo at the moment is brilliant turquoise with red.)

“I thought I had kind of thrown away my computer science degree, but I really am using a lot of my computer science skills in pattern drafting,” she says, reflecting on how her experiences and training have finally coalesced, “and when I’m doing my manufacturing process, I’m doing it really linearly, like as if I was writing a program. I love to find the best way to do production. And I love the precision of the laser cutter on the knit fabric.” Her dad would be proud.

NOTE THAT textile art is definitely “a thing” at this year’s Crawl. Here are just a few other studios to check out if you’re a fan of fibre artistry:

MADDLESMADE

MakerLabs

Fun explosions of colour, employing artfully reused and recycled textile waste and offcuts. Think knobby, multihued rag-rug hanging baskets and lampshades. Shag-adelic!

Bettina Matzkuhn

Mergatroid Building

Intricate embroidered landscapes express ecology, weather, and geography—think vast clouds spreading over West Coast waves and landforms—through impressive stitching techniques that look at first, from a distance, like paint brush strokes on canvas.

DYE EMMA

Sunrise Studios

Tie dye without the hippie crunch, as designer Emma Lancaster uses low-impact, nontoxic processes to create watery blue table linens, conversation-piece totes, and funky socks, all on deadstock or ethically sourced, organic fabrics.

Maria Heo

Parker Street Studios

Artful, reflective landscapes and abstracts stitched out of reclaimed materials—a testament to this Korean-born artist’s dedication to protecting Planet Earth. She creates entire, Zen new universes out of carefully cut and stitched plaids, felts, and knits.

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Janet Smith

Janet Smith is an award-winning arts journalist who has spent more than two decades immersed in Vancouver’s dance, screen, design, theatre, music, opera, and gallery scenes. She sits on the Vancouver Film Critics’ Circle.