Cloth in Context
Alberta Craft Discovery Gallery
November 7 – December 24, 2020

Artists: Charis Birchall, Jolie Bird, Natalie Gerber, Bill Morton, and Irene Rasetti

Curator: Natalie Gerber

Fine craft demands of its maker that they are the artist, the designer, the craftsman and the technician. Where then, does such hand-crafted work live within a culture that celebrates convenience coming from ‘fast’ design and ‘fast’ making. A culture where traditional craft knowledge and skills have been marginalized by mass production and mass consumption?

As curator and a maker, Natalie Gerber has chosen not only spectacular examples of contemporary surface and textile design but to highlight the often discounted aspect – the value added to fine craft by the slower aspects of fine craft making. Although working with different techniques, what these makers have in common is that the materials and processes that they have chosen to use exact their own rhythm – indifferent to the speed, technology, and efficiency that defines so much of our modern age.

To this end, she decided that the artists, Charis Birchall, Jolie Bird, Bill Morton, Irene Rasetti and herself would keep journals recording their processes – including time investment. Through these notations one becomes privy to not only the maker’s commitment to their medium but their high regard for rituality and the repetitive gesture that defines craft. It is hoped that these journals will inspire a greater appreciation of authenticity and the legacy of fine craft as distinct from the ‘fast’ consumer-driven production that promises instant, if fleeting, gratification.

For in these works of fine craft we see that “each mark made and each word spoken are born of a gesture or utterance through which a fabric of history unfolds, simultaneously both very old and very young, marking a passage of lived time and remembered rhythms.”

Upon proposing this exhibition Gerber deliberated for some time over the title, finally settling on the word cloth, perhaps the most mundane of labels for what curators have spent decades re-framing as unique conceptual works of textile-art, art-fabric, or fibre-art. There is no doubt that the textiles that make up Cloth in Context fulfill the art criteria; nonetheless, by their very nature, they are destined to move beyond the frame and away from the pedestal, for these works have a role to play in the art of everyday life.

Excerpt from exhibition statement by Dr. Jennifer E. Salahub, Professor Emerita of Art and Craft Histories at Alberta University of the Arts.

Cloth in Context
Alberta Craft Discovery Gallery
November 7 – December 24, 2020

Artists: Charis Birchall, Jolie Bird, Natalie Gerber, Bill Morton, and Irene Rasetti

Curator: Natalie Gerber

Process photography by Elyse Bouvier

Cloth in Context
Alberta Craft Discovery Gallery
November 7 – December 24, 2020

Artists: Charis Birchall, Jolie Bird, Natalie Gerber, Bill Morton, and Irene Rasetti

Curator: Natalie Gerber

Cloth in Context
Alberta Craft Discovery Gallery
November 7 – December 24, 2020

Artists: Charis Birchall, Jolie Bird, Natalie Gerber, Bill Morton, and Irene Rasetti

Curator: Natalie Gerber

View of Jolie Bird’s sketchbook in exhibition

Cloth in Context
Alberta Craft Discovery Gallery
November 7 – December 24, 2020

Artists: Charis Birchall, Jolie Bird, Natalie Gerber, Bill Morton, and Irene Rasetti

Curator: Natalie Gerber

Detail of BrushD: Grid, Terracotta & Mushroom by Natalie Gerber
30” x 72”. Screen print on linen, water based pigment.

Cloth in Context
Alberta Craft Discovery Gallery
November 7 – December 24, 2020

Artists: Charis Birchall, Jolie Bird, Natalie Gerber, Bill Morton, and Irene Rasetti

Curator: Natalie Gerber

Detail of The Next Turn by Charis Birchall
30” x 72”. Pigment on linen, block-print and stencil.

Cloth in Context
Alberta Craft Discovery Gallery
November 7 – December 24, 2020

Artists: Charis Birchall, Jolie Bird, Natalie Gerber, Bill Morton, and Irene Rasetti

Curator: Natalie Gerber

Detail of Friendship twill by Jolie Bird
30”x72”. Cotton, linen, indigo, cochineal and weld.

Cloth in Context
Alberta Craft Discovery Gallery
November 7 – December 24, 2020

Artists: Charis Birchall, Jolie Bird, Natalie Gerber, Bill Morton, and Irene Rasetti

Curator: Natalie Gerber

Detail of Summer Peonies, Mauve & Purple by Bill Morton
30” x 72”. Screen print on linen, water based pigment.
Printed by Natalie Gerber Studio.

Cloth in Context
Alberta Craft Discovery Gallery
November 7 – December 24, 2020

Artists: Charis Birchall, Jolie Bird, Natalie Gerber, Bill Morton, and Irene Rasetti

Curator: Natalie Gerber

Detail of Woods’ Rose II by Irene Rasetti
30” x 72”. Rose leaves on silk charmeuse.

Cloth in Context
Alberta Craft Discovery Gallery
November 7 – December 24, 2020

Artists: Charis Birchall, Jolie Bird, Natalie Gerber, Bill Morton, and Irene Rasetti

Curator: Natalie Gerber