Sewing Stewardship

Relational Performance: an experiment in tending
Guelph 2021
 

Sewing Stewardship was an exhibition hosted at ReMediate and curated by Lore Arts with work by textile artists Anita Cazzola, Jenna Kessler and myself. The exhibition “explored practices that loosen and unravel the paradoxical knots of stewardship through manual care; mending, sewing and weaving together new understandings and relationships of what it means to care for our environment and relationships within the treaty lands and territory of the Mississaugas of the Credit.”

For the exhibition, I created an experiment in tending - a collaboration with Nokomis Carol Tyler exploring ecological and decolonial responsibility through reading, ceremony, listening, and gardening. We read a poetic land acknowledgement out loud together, and spend time tending the garden and being in ceremony as a way to integrate ideas in the text through our bodies and through relating to land. Cazzola’s A flag for the plants and Kessler’s Stewardship Quilt are also shown installed on site.

Exhibition History
Sewing Stewardship, Lore Arts Guelph, 2021. Curated by Fan-Ling Suen and Halley Roback.

Photos: Victoria MacPhail and Shannon Kingsbury