A Conversation with the Collab Quilt Collective

Featuring Speakers Lindsey Bond, Jacquelyn Hébert, Christel Lanthier, Kalea Turner-Beckman and Michelle Wilson
March 8, 2023
11:00 am – 12:15 pm on Zoom
Event Recording with ASL Interpretation

ASL Interpretation will be available.

In conjunction with Lindsey Bond’s exhibition Conversational Threads, Gallery 1C03 is pleased to host a discussion with several members of the Collab Quilt Collective whose in-progress work, Conversational Quilt, is displayed in the gallery.

The Collab Quilt Collective self-identify as artists, folx, parents and grandparents who are sewing transformative textile conversations to unsettle divergent and overlapping colonial inheritances. The form of the conversational quilt creates space to unlearn, grapple and build relationships with inherited materials, skills and more-than-human neighbours. In striving to create more relational family legacies, we incorporate slow and diverse ecological material processes grounded in aspen parkland and prairie ecosystems. Our work acknowledges complex colonial harms and erasures while navigating interwoven histories across indigenous territories in what is now known as canada.

Following a discussion with several members of the Collective, there will be an opportunity for questions from the audience.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Lindsey Bond (she/her) is an intermedia artist-mother born in amiskwacîwâskahikan (Beaver Hills House) or Edmonton. Using slow textile and photographic processes she intervenes in her white-settler family archive to think-through her responsibility as mother and settler descendant to remember and sew a relationship with Treaty 6 Territory and kisiskâciwani-sîpiy or North Saskatchewan River. Lindsey recently defended her MFA Thesis Ecosystems of Inheritance at The University of Alberta. She received her BFA in Photography from Emily Carr University of Art + Design and studied Visual Communications at Edinburgh College of Art, Scotland. Her artwork has been exhibited in TREX Southeast, Latitude 53, Harcourt House, Gallery 44 and The Richmond International Film + Media Arts Festival.

Jacquelyn Hébert is a Franco-Manitoban artist who works mostly in installation, craft, photo and media art. In 2015, an interest in slow design and functional art led her to launch atelier nouk. The goal of this ongoing craft-based project is not mass production but a way to create handmade objects and build relationships with people through making and design collaborations. She has presented her work both nationally and internationally and holds an MFA in Fibres and Materials from Concordia University, a BFA in Film and Media from Emily Carr University and a BA in Anthropology from the University of Manitoba.

Christel Lanthier is a Franco-Manitobian multidisciplinary Métis Artist, Mother, Shepherdess, and caretaker of land on Treaty One Territory. Her work focuses on cyclical functions of a never-ending cycle. Christel is passionate about turning sunlight and grass into textile through a holistic and regenerative approach of land management and her family farm. She accomplishes this by means of her grazing flock of Rideau Arcott, Romney, Shetland and Rambouillet sheep and the beautiful wool they grow. That wool is then turned into yarn or felt that go onto become local textiles. Recently having acquired large needle felting equipment, Christel fabricates intentionally created zero waste creations that can be utilised and then entirely composted once spent. Additionally, Christel explores the media of photography and snow sculpting, having coordinated the International Snow Sculpture Symposium in Winnipeg for the last 10 years.

Kalea Turner-Beckman (she/her) lives and works on Treaty 6 Territory in Amiskwaciwâskahikan/Edmonton, AB. She disrupts the exploitative global wool industry by creating yarns that are ethical and sustainable at every step of the supply chain, working directly with local sheep farms and fibre mills, and using all-natural dyes in her work. Kalea studied Sustainable Development at the University of St Andrews, Communication for Development at Malmö University, and is a current student in the Master Spinner program at Olds College. She began her exploration into local wool as co-founder of the Alberta Yarn Project from 2014-2020, and launched her own sustainable yarn brand, Luddite Yarn, in 2020.

Michelle Wilson is an artist and mother currently residing as an uninvited guest on Treaty Six territory in London, Ontario. She defended her SSHRC and OGS-funded Ph.D. in May 2022 at the University of Western Ontario. As a feminist of settler descent studying in colonial institutions, Wilson’s dissertation investigated and confronted the Euro-American archive and how other animals’ bodies are employed to convey colonial knowledge systems, with their stories of survival used to perpetuate myths of “settler saviours.” Michelle’s ongoing projects include leading the (re)mediating soils project and the Coves Collective, a group of artist-activists engaged in actions on the Land that challenge ideas of ownership and conservation. She is a postdoctoral scholar with the Conservation through Reconciliation Partnership at the University of Guelph.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Gallery 1C03 is on Treaty 1 Territory. We are located on the territories of the Anishinaabeg, Cree, Oji-Cree, Dakota and Dene peoples, and the homeland of the Métis Nation. Our water is sourced from Shoal Lake 40 First Nation.