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The Textiles and Materiality Cluster at the Milieux Institute invites you to a 30-minute panel discussion and Q&A session exploring key themes from the National Gallery of Canada’s Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction exhibition. Join PhD scholars Victoria MacBeath, Geneviève Moisan, Fernanda Suarez, and Morris Fox for a captivating conversation that will touch on:
This discussion will not only delve into these themes through the panelists’ creative research practices but will also serve as a lead-in to the Woven Futures: In Conversation panel, which will take place later in the evening.
This second panel, hosted at the National Gallery of Canada and live-broadcasted into our space, will feature a Q&A where members will have the opportunity to ask questions first to panelists, Dr. Miranda Smitheram, Armando Perla, and Michaëlle Sergile.
Victoria MacBeath is a PhD candidate in the department of art history at Concordia University in Montréal, Canada. Her SSHRC-funded doctoral research considers the intersections of care ethics and craft-making practices in 20th-century New Brunswick. In doing so, it takes up questions of language politics, settler and indigenous relations, notions of folklore and heritage, and the rural and urban divide. Her research interests include material culture, craft, Atlantic history, gender and feminist studies, and heritage.
Geneviève Moisan is a skilled Jacquard weaver with a strong technical background in textile construction, printing, and dyeing. As a PhD student in Art Education at Concordia University, her research explores the transfer of textile knowledge in informal learning settings, particularly in support groups for caregivers. She actively participates in diverse collaborative research projects, including creating textile antennas for video communication, Jacquard weaving, soft circuit textiles, and cultivating bacteria to develop sustainable fibre dyeing protocols. Genevieve works as an equipment support specialist at Milieux Institute for Arts, Culture, and Technology, where she also teaches workshops on weaving and digital embroidery.
She holds a BFA from UQAM, an MFA in Fibres and Material Practices from Concordia University, and a diploma in Higher Education Pedagogy. Since 2019, she has been a part-time instructor in the Fibres and Material Practices program at Concordia University. Her work has been exhibited in various venues, including the Centre d’action culturelle de la MRC de Papineau, as well as in Montreal, Toronto, Venice, Paris, and Oaxaca, Mexico.
Fernanda Suarez is a visual artist with an MA in Communication and Social Change and a BFA, currently a PhD candidate in the Interdisciplinary Humanities PhD student at Concordia University. Her artistic practice is transdisciplinary, deploying a situated approach to drawing, textile, text, and craft techniques to address issues of gender, subjectivity, and collaboration. With an interest in the material implications of textile production from a feminist decolonial approach, her practice explores memory and knowledge. Environment and technique are central to her processes as open forms of knowledge that come into meaning through relations.
Her research-creation project explores the experience of weaving together with Nahua indigenous and Mestiza women in the Nahua community of Cuacuila, located in the Sierra Norte de Puebla in Mexico. By working together, they have learned and retaken almost extinct techniques in this territory. Although having a complex relationship influenced by colonial legacies, learning and creating together has allowed us to recognize each other and forge different bonds.
Morris Fox is a settler-Canadian interdisciplinary visual artist and poet whose work explores the hauntings of our ecological and socio-political atmospheres through a queer and gothic ecological lens. Fox integrates writing and ecological motifs into poetry, chainmaille soft sculptures, crafted queer ephemera, and digital video, asking what it means to make worlds and conditions of liveability, as queer possibility, within ecological end times?
Based in Tio’tia:ke/Mooniyang (Montréal), Morris is currently pursuing a PhD in the Interdisciplinary Humanities program at Concordia University. He has exhibited artworks and programmed workshops and talks internationally, including Tio’tia:ke/Mooniyang (Montréal), Tkaronto (Toronto), where he grew up, the United States and Iceland. His work has notably been featured in various exhibitions such as Spring Awaits (Wick Gallery, Minneapolis, 2025), Cruise-ading (Webster Library, Montréal, 2024), Sex Ecologies: Becoming Plastic (Stoveworks, Chattanooga TS, 2023), My Gay Mediaeval Times (Spacemaker ii, Toronto, 2022), and Vestiges and Remains (Artcite Inc., Windsor, 2022). He holds a BFA (Concordia U, 2010) and a Low Residency MFA (School of the Art Institute of Chicago, 2018).
: February 20, 2025 | 5-5:30 PM
: Milieux Learning Atelier EV 11.425
