newness

Mary E. Black Gallery at Craft Nova Scotia

August 21 – September 27, 2026

2026 Craft Nova Scotia Juried Members' Exhibition

Artists: Marla Benton, Jessica Berry, Wilma Butts, Kate Gardiner, Murray Gibson, Philip Hare, Antoinette Karuna, Yuliia Khovbosha, Mary Jane Lundy, Eunseon Park, Kary Shannon, Ralph Simpson, Jacqueline Steudler, Jessie Tesoli

Exhibition jury: Krista Grunsky, Lindsay Macdonald, Shauna MacLeod

This group exhibition presents the work of 13 contemporary textile artists from the Atlantic region. Historically associated with utilitarian objects and works created by women as an act of domestic labour, textile based works have too often been placed on the margins of art history. This exhibition explores the ways in which textile as object is being explored in three ways: through installations that push the nature of textile as medium, through durational work that explore the nature of textiles, the body and acts of labour, and through textiles as form to explore complex personal and social histories.

Artist Statement

These works were created in the aftermath of my father’s sudden death to pancreatic cancer, in response to the enormous grief that I felt. An immigrant from Malaysia of Tamil Sri Lankan descent, my father was a domestic person. After he died, as an artist, it felt right to me to contemplate scenes of his domestic life, where so much of our relationship had been lived.  

My father loved to garden, and the textile work 133 Crescent Road, Garden with Swing Set, 1985–1991, is a scene of my childhood garden in London, England. The ceramic triptych After Suppertime depicts my father’s late-life, after-supper ritual of watching tv and drinking tea. These works explore familial, migratory, and diasporic grief, and notions of home, belonging, and immigrant homemaking.  

Newness presents itself throughout these works, as they are the result of much experimentation, representing new directions in my practice, both materially and technically. Ceramics is a brand-new medium for me, and I used new-to-me textile techniques such as appliqué, drawing and painting on fabric, and incorporating Indian textiles.  

The sudden death of my father brought shocking newness––a new family iteration, a new way of existing in the world in his absence, new understandings and experiences of grief. My family’s long history of immigration is also a story of newness, of renewal, of rooting and uprooting in new lands and cultures. Newness is also present in my South Asian diasporic experience, cultivating new ways of being Tamil as a diasporic and multiracial individual living in rural Nova Scotia.