The Textiles and Materiality Cluster at Milieux announces the winners of its twelfth round of student research grants. The Cluster awarded Individual Research Grants to Shelley Ouellet (MFA Fibres and Material Practices) and Jessie Stainton (MA Media Studies). T&M is grateful to the Hexagram Network and Milieux Institute of Arts, Culture and Technology at Concordia University for making these student research grants possible.
Shelley Ouellet received an Individual Research Grant for her graduate research and creation focus on how representations of landscape have been used to construct a brand of Canadian identity that re-enforces colonialism and supports an economy of perpetual resource extraction. Linked political and cultural policies intended to champion the modernization and industrialization of a young nation post-WWII have successfully emblemized fictional representations of majestic and unpeopled landscapes that continue to represent Canada to this day. These images help to sustain dominant historical narratives of settler discovery, exploration, and conquest. Through a series of embroidered landscapes on black velvet, Shelley Ouellet critiqued this representation of national identity and its imbrication with resource-extraction.
Jessie Stainton received an Individual Research Grant for her research project, For Which Bodies? Stainton questioned what does it mean to make art accessible? Not just by adding a ramp or closed captions – the checkmarks of regulated access— but in thinking of access as transformative of artwork itself. For Which Bodies? Stainton utilized the techno-textile machines of T&M and used soft-circuit sensors, sound design and textile components to create two multi-sensory textile collages where access was considered part of the process. Drawing on the fields of critical disability studies and sensory studies, Stainton’s project experimented with creative methods of increasing access in art and interrogated the implicit hierarchies and assumptions built into the traditional art-audience relationship.
textiles + materiality research cluster 