Rug hooking, 'craftivism' and queer culture intersect at new exhibit

As any self-respecting crafter knows, it takes a lot of hard work, time and dedication not to mention devoted interestto create something not only beautiful, but also unique.

That's also a lesson any drag queen or fan of RuPaul's Drag Race knows, like Jason Wells, whose alter ego is Irma Gerd.

"When I do drag I see things and I think, 'OK, I can make this tiny art object, but make that into a whole outfit and then build a number around it,'" said Wells.

"Often I'll find just a singular object and be like, 'Oh, there's something neat about this,' and then turn that into a piece of jewelry or a fabric that becomes an outfit, a shape that I think of that will make for a nice silhouette or headpiece. Or anything. You're always just looking and picking and designing."

The overlapping of crafting and queer culture, as well as what Kailey Bryan brands as crafting activism or "craftivism" is the focus of Handiwerk, a new exhibit at the Craft Council Gallery in St. John's.

That overlap was something Bryan, one of the curators of the Handiwerk exhibit, found intensely interesting.

Bryan was mentored by Wells in the role of "drag mother" and it was working behind the scenes that put a spotlight on just how much craft work goes into drag performances.

"I was totally in awe of the behind-the-scenes experience, witnessing the amount of hand-crafted labour that goes into every drag performance, the resourcefulness and the resilience that is there, the DIY attitude," Bryan said.

"I've been a craft artist for many years, as well, and worked in the craft sector and I see so many commonalities between the craft practices of artists in this town, as well as the drag performers."

From women's work to art

It's part of an ongoing dialogue, Bryan said, about the changing definition of what it means to be a Newfoundland and Labrador craft artist.

"Craft is becoming so much more contemporary now and we can do something very interesting with it," Bryan told CBC's St. John's Morning Show.

An example of the modern meets traditional art form is rug hooking something Jason Ross Sellars knows all about.

"My great-grandmother, she was a really prolific rug hooker and I was fortunate enough to grow up having her around she lived to be 98 years old so I was in university when I lost [her]," Sellars said.

Sellars has a series of rugs on display in the Handiwerk exhibit, using a modern design twist on some old family designs handed down from his great-grandmother.

"I used her patterns, but of course now the materials you can get are far flashier, they're more vibrant, so I have faux fur and sequins and sparkles," Sellars said.

"But it's really nice to think about her work and the time she spent, how that wasn't acknowledged, how it was predominantly a female craft that really didn't carry value, and now, of course, rug hooking is something that is commercially viable, something that people do regard as hard work and labour-intensive work."

Sellars said his great-grandmother would often incorporate a rose in her designs, a symbol that had a dual meaning to her.

She was an English woman, Sellars said, and the rose is a symbol for that,but it also was something that paid homage to her mother-in-law, who adopted her son.

"In those times, adoption and children out of wedlock were a sense of shame, so I think that the idea that this rose was in one part prideful, but on the other part to acknowledge a truth or something that was covered up because of shame, was something really interesting, as a queer crafter, to think about," Sellars said.

"Pride is something that we're all saddled with there's Pride festivals, Pride parades, and I think that comes out of the fact that there's also shame that we carry alone, that we don't really acknowledge or talk about publicly, and I think pride is the answer to that."

Those similarities in rug hooking stand out to Bryan, too.

"It originated as a craft of necessity that was very much about using scraps to make things that were necessary in the home, and how that was sort of transformed to some extent commercially," Bryan said, adding that it wasn't until the late 1800s they became commercially viable.

"Resources were distributed to people to rug hookers and then those were paid for and sold off, and so the commercial viability of the craft also meant that there was production of kits and things became a little more assembly line, they became slightly more, a little bit of the creative nuance went out of it."

The Handiwerk exhibit can be viewed at the Craft Council of Newfoundland and Labrador gallery on Duckworth Street in St. John's until Sept. 29.

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