White-settler artist Lindsey Bond uses textiles and other media to investigate her family archives in the Gallery 1C03 exhibition Conversational Threads, which features the Collab Quilt Collective.
Bond re-stories hand-me-down sheets and inherited photographs, as well as oral and written stories by her aunts from the family Red Rose Tea Tin Archive, in her work. The exhibit also includes art created by her son.
Conversational Threads visualizes the hard conversations between Bond, her Aunts, and her son. Critical material conversations engage and expand dialogue around women’s handwork and ancestral healing, while questioning the maker’s privilege and responsibility of working ecologically.
“Previously focused on photo and video-based art, which do make an appearance in Conversational Threads, Bond shifted her practice to textiles,” said Jennifer Gibson, Gallery 1C03 Director/Curator. “Textiles and hand work honour the creative labour of her aunts and of women more generally. They are also a slow way of making that offers time for contemplation of her relationship with other humans and more than human relations.”
Material conversations and relationship building are central to the pieces presented, and stitch together themes of intergenerational settler repair work, the weight of inheritance, relationality, and herstories on Treaty 6 Territory.
The exhibition program included a discussion with members of the Collab Quilt Collective, whose Conversational Quilt installation is presented in the Gallery and a Sewing Inheritance textile workshop.
“Conversational Threads is an excellent follow-up to Jaimie Isaac’s Brings to Light exhibition, which was a personal response to her family’s experience as Residential School Survivors and a call to action for Indigenous knowledge and language repatriation,” said Gibson. “In Conversational Threads, Lindsey Bond is a white settler who digs into her family history and asks tough questions about how she can practice decolonization in her life and through her artworks. Like Jaimie Isaac, Bond works inter-generationally and also with a community of fellow makers, as well as with guidance from Elders and Knowledge Keepers to create art in a good way.”
Conversational Threads runs until Friday, April 14. Please check out the exhibition brochure.
About Gallery 1C03
Gallery 1C03 is located on Treaty 1 Territory, the homeland of the Red River Métis and the ancestral lands of the Anishinaabeg, Ininew, Anishininew, Dakota, and Dene peoples. Our water is sourced from Shoal Lake 40 First Nation.
Gallery 1C03 thanks program partners the Manitoba Craft Council and the Departments of Women’s and Gender Studies and History at The University of Winnipeg.
About Lindsey Bond
Bond (she/her) was 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 a mother and settler descendant to remember and sew a relationship with Treaty 6 Territory.
Bond 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.
About the Collab Quilt Collective
The Collab Quilt Collective self-identify as artists, folx, parents, and grandparents who sew 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.
