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A Patchwork Photo Quilt of T&M

Six months into my time as the Milieux Institute’s storyteller and I’m still discovering new sites of research and creation. Today, it’s the MaSH lab, a relatively new research space for making and experimenting with matter through sustainable processes. I’ve been invited by the lab’s director, Miranda Smitheram, interrupting her sabbatical to ask her about the Textiles & Materiality cluster, where she’s served as co-director since 2021.

MS: What I really love about Milieux is that it provides this home and grounding sort of space for fermentation and cross-pollination of ideas and research amongst emerging as well as more established researchers. Textiles and Materiality has quite a broad remit given that materiality runs across lots of different research fields. We have librarians, we have art historians, we have people working in textiles and fibers of course, but also sculpture and design and even computation arts. The cohort of Textiles and Materiality comes from a really broad range but maybe have similar thematics that they’re interested in or able to support and discuss with each other or sort of localized around different thematics.”

NT: So there are people from so many different disciplines and they’re coming together in one cluster. What does that look like?

MS: It looks like a lot of people who are very interested in how materials and processes come together with theory and I think that’s really interesting in and of itself. Theory is often abstract and in Textiles and Materiality you see people who are interested and engaged with research and theory but are interested in how that manifests physically in the world.

NT: Have the cluster’s research interests changed in your time?

MS: I think the focus of Textiles and Materiality shifts over time to reflect the research interests that are bubbling up, and becoming more pertinent or more necessary in people’s minds and hearts and interests. I think before I came on board there was a lot of interest and research and development in smart textiles and wearable technologies, and I would say at the moment a kind of more key theme that I’ve seen over the past year and a half is definitely communities of care. So there’s different research projects that sit broadly within that or adjacent to that. But from our student membership themselves, there has been a lot of discussion and interest really in advocating and hopefully arguing for care itself as a methodology.

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This photo essay documents works in progress by members of Textiles & Materiality, showcasing a range and unity within the cluster that can only make sense when witnessed. The convergence of historied techniques and traditions with new technologies and research interests afford the cluster a unique vibrancy, relevance, and position both within Milieux and the larger landscape of research-creation. Whenever I met a member of the cluster, I left with research homework: obscure painters, Russian metalwork, the intricacies of wool.

CLUCA’s studio in the Visual Arts Building. The prolific artist draws on her background in sociology in her pursuit of the Fibres and Material Practices MFA.
Inspired by paintings from 2016-2017, CLUCA’s swimmers celebrate joy and play among the working class and their first paid holidays.
Digital embroidery work in progress. The final pieces are now on display at the Maison de la culture du Plateau-Mont-Royal.
Ceramic braids inspired by Italian artist Carol Rama, one of CLUCA’s greatest inspirations.
Engraved acrylic portraits of Rama. Since starting the project in 2017, CLUCA has conducted oral history interviews in Turin with people who knew Rama to create a narrative titled Searching for Carol Rama.
CLUCA uses the Tajima to embroider covers from the books of French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. An interest in materiality and collective references are the throughlines of her practice.
T&M support technician Geneviève Moisan’s humorous, passionate ode to the Tajima embroidery machine.
The work in progress is full of references to the machine’s history and quirks.
Moisan is currently creating an alternative graphic novel exploring memory through digital embroidery.
Scraps and samples. PhD candidate in Geography Pramila Choudhary explores the use of sheep wool in regions of India.
The Future is Wool members Pramila Choudhary, Vanessa Randall, and Sharmistha Kar work on a panel.
The research-creation initiative exploring the personal and sustainable potential of wool. This panel series explain the story, history, and future of wool in Canada.
The panel depicts sheep/fibre farmer Anna Hunter with her book The True Cost of Wool.
PhD candidate Fernanda Suarez’s project draws on weaving with Nahua indigenous and Mestiza women in the Nahua community to learn almost extinct techniques.
After starting an MFA in Studio Arts, Alexey Lazarev discovered a surprise passion for metal work.
Lazarev traces his interest in metal work back to his native St-Petersburg and its iconic architecture. His designs incorporate wildflowers found in both Canada and Russia, discovering a subconscious nostalgia.
Clothing and object designer Anne-Marie Laflamme questions the modern preference for smooth materials by highlighting a raw, rough, and imperfect beauty in her hand-made pieces. She explores tensions between smoothness and roughness, and attraction and repulsion, creating a sense of “familiarity but also discomfort”

– Nadia Trudel, Milieux Storyteller

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