Community threads make up life's rusty fabric

I once left a wet tin can on a shirt and forgot to remove it for a few days. It wasn’t a nice shirt, obviously. It was a makeshift painting smock. The art I was trying to make was unmemorable, but the can left a metallic ring on the shirt that made it look like a blank badge.

In the mind of an artist, similar accidents can lead to great things.

Take Deanna Rowley for example. The Lethbridge-based textile artist loves the meaning of cloth for how symbolic it is to our lives. It covers us in life and it can shroud us in death. She even talks about how fabric is ‘woven’ into her own history and memory, connecting her to herself and to the significant people in her life. She has gone one step further in her recent work by observing the provincial landscape and all of the dead objects at the side of the road. Rusted and forgotten pieces of farm equipment or tools still have memories attached to them and she has seen fit to give them new life by wrapping them in silk cloth, the same metallic patterns rubbing off to create imprints and images like ghosts turning back into humans.

“It’s the act of wrapping that really interests me,” she explained, “That connection between the cloth — the wrapping and shrouding — but also the objects that live with us through time.”

Starting off by using objects from a scrap yard, she began experimenting with scavenged pieces from the Old Man River where a past flood revealed some other decayed treasures that symbolize a major component of the Albertan identity.

“What I find interesting is that they’re part of our culture. They’re pieces that live with our culture. I thought ‘What is my culture?’ That’s really where I come from.”

As for Arlene Westen Evans, the other artist in the show, she too shares a love of fabrics but is more interested in exploring how the fabric itself creates identity on its own and conveys information about the people associated with it. She has come up The Clothes Line Project, a real clothesline with donated items that show how simple objects can create powerful connections. Even the line itself is a grand representation of how we used to feel attached to our neighbours by hanging our laundry between us. She calls the textiles themselves a repository of information.

Evans will also be doing some performance art between 1 and 4 p.m. on July 10, 17, 24 and 31. Called The Laundress Confidante, she will tend to sewing buttons on your clothes in exchange for personal stories. She calls this an opportunity to air out your own ‘dirty laundry’ without being judged. It’s a truly unique concept to the gallery so hopefully it brings new neighbours out of their homes to share their lives over some fabric. If you’re interested in following more stories, please visit laundressconfidante.blogspot.com where you can read entries such as The Language of Socks.