April 26 – June 8, 2024
The Main Gallery
Opening Reception: Friday April 26th, 7 -10 pm
Free admission
PANORAMADA – the exquisitely executed body of textile works by Caitlin Thompson, a Calgary-based textile and multimedia artist and art educator – animates the gallery space with colorful needleworks incorporating embroidery, appliqué, and repeating patterns. The natural and the digital collide in imagery of landscapes – made both by hand and with machine. PANORAMADA is an exhibition of embroidermation – combining both embroidery and animation to create looping, revolving scenes of landscapes nodding towards the history of the panoramic vista.
While working with natural fibres, Caitlin thinks about the life cycles that those materials contain. An attraction to materials is the instigator, and resourcefulness stimulates her response to these materials. For many years she has been collecting used textiles, mainly shawls from thrift stores. Comprised mostly of wool or wool/silk blends, these second-hand materials are meant to be on the body. Their colors are meant to be on the body. These shawls are indicators of color trends in the last 20 years, and Caitlin enjoys responding to this limited, but highly representational palette. By using fabric from worn pieces of clothing she is putting the figure into the landscape – in a material sense.
While working at Glenbow Museum as an educator, Caitlin Thompson assisted with tours and workshops for the Eye of the Needle exhibition. One of these – a behind-the-scenes tour – escorted groups through the Glenbow cultural histories department to view their collection of quilts. Quilting has a history of resourcefulness to it, a respect for fabric where there is little waste. The names of quilt patterns would reflect on the meanings of fabric, and how cherished it was. Quilts were used as geometric and geographical landscapes of people, their fabric, their clothes, and their lives.
As Caitlin began looking at traditional quilt patterns, she quickly saw their potential as animation designs. If the pattern remains constant, but the colors change from quilt block to quilt block, these blocks can be animated to make the colors shimmer through the pattern. After sewing these large patchworks together she began to use digital cut-out animation techniques to animate them. To her, these large, quilted pieces become animate objects, endowed with life and movement through replacement animation.
Artist’s Biography
Caitlin Thompson grew up in rural east-central Alberta and completed her BFA in Sculpture at Red Deer College and the Alberta College of Art + Design (2007). After working for a few years in the arts sector, she moved to Montréal to pursue an MFA in Fibres and Material Practices from Concordia University (2015), specializing in digital embroidery. Caitlin moved back to Alberta to complete the beneficial cycle of journeying and returning. While maintaining a studio practice, she also works as an arts educator and gallery preparator.
Caitlin Thompson has participated in artist residencies at the National Film Board, Est-Nord-Est, Struts Gallery, and the Calgary Allied Arts Foundation. Her work has been exhibited at the Art Gallery of Alberta, the Esker Foundation, Glenbow Museum, and artist-run centres in Québec, Saskatchewan, and the Yukon. She is the recipient of several grants and has presented her research in textiles and animation in lectures, workshops, and conferences. Caitlin’s areas of interest include animate objects, romanticism and hauntology, the elegant grotesque, fashion as becoming, and the transformative potential of craft.
PANORAMADA was created with funding from the Alberta Foundation for the Arts
Top Image: Waterfall (detail): 2019, hand and machine embroidery and appliqué on wool, silk, ramie
Courtesy of the artist
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