Resident Artist: March 10 – July 31, 2023
Jane Walker is a visual artist, art writer, and community organizer based in Bonavista, NL. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Visual Arts (2015) from Grenfell Campus, Memorial University and a Masters of Research with Distinction from The Glasgow School of Art (2017), where she studied rural art supports in Scotland and Newfoundland.
Jane works in a variety of media and has shared her work in exhibitions, publications, and talks in Canada, the UK, Iceland, Ireland, France, and Singapore. She worked with a small team to establish Union House Arts, an artist-run-centre on the Bonavista Peninsula (2017-2022) and has since worked with various other arts organizations in the province, including Bonavista Biennale, Riddle Fence, and Business and Arts NL.
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Jane is completing a low-residency, via distance, with us from March to July 2023 as we work to prepare and train on the digital loom. The digital jacquard loom is located in the Makerspace Corner Brook.
Right now, in my practice, I am very interested in slow tech, a concept that I have been exploring through an ongoing digital project with the Grenfell Art Gallery, onthemiddleofnowhere.ca. The project encourages the visitor to slow down with simple imagery, nostalgic clickables, and gentle storytelling.
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What appeals to me about introducing digital looms to my weaving practice is that while the imaging technology is advanced, the loom still enables the weaver to build the cloth manually, pick by pick. Incorporating my analogue photography practice into my cloth drafts, something I would love to explore through TC2 technology, combining advanced and analogue methods.
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[ detail of the rock surface the previous image ]
I want to continue experimenting with intentional slow tech in my practice. Concepts that I want to explore further include using advanced textile technology to make one-of-a-kind cloth (not multiples), continuing my experiments with embedding drawing into cloth, preparing digital cloth drafts of my analogue photographs (combining slow tech), integrating my various media (textiles, photography, drawing/painting), and from a technical standpoint, understanding how to use a TC2 digital loom.