I understand the origins of my creative practice as being very typical for a fibre artist.
Quilting is a practice that is seldom taught through formal institutions. In many ways this felt congruous with the histories of Deaf, disability, and mad art that I have learned about. As
movements, these art practices are tied to histories of political struggles and resistance … or they are storied as cultural practices linked to identities of difference – art was developed as a way to
express pride or respond to oppression. So, on the one hand, my practice as quilter made sense to me in relation to situating my work alongside social movement organizing. Yet due to the fact that I came to see my creative work as an artistic practice late in my scholarly career, the feeling of not having “the right kind of training” became very present to me. So, I chose to take a semester off from my PhD studies in order to further my fibre training in the condensed Fibre Arts program at the Haliburton School of the Arts, through Fleming College.
Haliburton School of the Arts is situated on the traditional homeland of the Ojibway Nation and the Huron/Wendat Nation, and the territory now includes communities from the Mohawk Nation, the Pottawatomi Nation, and the Métis Nation of Ontario. Many people know Haliburton School of the Arts for their extensive summer programming. According to Watt, who reported on the fifty-year anniversary of the school in 2017, thousands of students take classes through the summer programming. The school was developed in the mid-1960s by a small group of artists as well as the Haliburton Highlands Guild of Fine Arts:
Ron McCaw, an avid photographer, came to Haliburton in 1966 to be the Minister of the United Church. He quickly gained an appreciation for the inspiring nature of the
Highlands and envisioned an art school that would become the Banff of the East. His vision became a mission and his enthusiasm became infectious. In 1966 a small but fiercely dedicated group of people gathered in a Haliburton living room. (“A Story of,”
n.d.)
Unsurprisingly, this storying of the inspiration for the school reads much like any other colonial project. The land is discovered, mined for its beauty and resources, commodified, marketed, and exploited for the well-meaning white colonial settler. These narratives of empty landscapes in waiting are ones that not only inform the positioning of many of the celebrated Canadian (read
white settler) artists (and craftspeople), but they have helped to build a national identity around our cultural institutions. Weavers and potters were some of the initial groups of artists, more specifically craftspeople, who became interested in the organizing of the school. The initial planning for Haliburton School of the Arts (now known as Haliburton School of Art and Design) coincided with the development of Sir Sandford Fleming College, which led to the creation of the school as a satellite program to the college.
There were three things that drew me to the Fibre Arts program at Haliburton: its proximity to my home, its condensed program, and its intensive focus on a broad curriculum of fibre practices. Although I was not able to live at home while attending the course, I was close enough that I was still able to return regularly, which was important in order to maintain employment. Cost of living in Haliburton is low, and with the aid of a bursary I was able to afford to take on the extra studies while still being engaged in my scholarship for my PhD.
Seeing as the program was condensed, it only required me to commit to one semester of learning.
For the most part this was preferable to me, as I was already multiple years into my PhD and was not able to conceive of extending my studies beyond one semester. However, the intensive style of the program also made it difficult, if not impossible, to attend to issues of accommodations in any type of meaningful way; this was a point not lost on me. As a graduate student and a
university instructor, I have both formally and informally learned the ways to meet my accommodations needs within systems that are not set up to meet them for me. This is not a privilege that most Deaf, mad, and disabled students have. And so, while the programming is seen as being innovative in setup, it is important to consider how the small and remote
characteristics of the school position it both as under-resourced in its ability to attend to issues of access and accommodation and perhaps as “flying under the radar” in that the number of
students reporting these needs is seen as insignificant due primarily to the school’s overall smaller attendance.
And so the program is built around, as Watt (2017) reports, a sense of camaraderie and community. Who is envisioned as the community, however, is representational of those who feel a sense of belonging in the communities that are positioned at the centre of arts and craft worlds.
As such, all of my instructors at the college were white creative types who did not engage a politics of making in their pedagogy. While I cannot entirely presuppose each instructor’s ways of self-identifying, I do know that there were no connections made between our training in fibre arts and the struggles of resistance that I have come to learn inform my peers’ aesthetics. On our field trip to Toronto, we were asked to marvel at the textiles in an area of Toronto referred to as Little India, in a way that wholly fetishized and exoticized a culture, and with no
contextualization of the material reality of racism in Canada. The trip to the ROM incorporated a reflection on the work of Anatsui without a conversation around the politics of global
imperialism, capitalism, and colonization. Nor did it situate the political context of museums and their far-from-neutral histories in the field of arts and culture. Our lessons on techniques and aesthetics related to fibre practices were entirely ahistorical and apolitical. Perhaps this is not representative of all of the programming at the school, yet with a focus on rigour and innovation, it is clear that instructors are hired for their roles as recognized artists and not for what their aesthetics contribute to our social world.
What I learned from my experiences in a Fibre Arts program was that there is an element of formal training that can help an artist “pass” in the formal art world. Through day-to-day instruction in a classroom that was in effect set up to be a studio, I learned what it meant to frame my practice as studio work. I learned the language and culture of creating through the
perspectives of various creative workers who came with professional, scholarly, and informal training. I was able to witness the different ways that all of these elements of a person’s artistic journey inform the work that they do. Most if not all of these lessons I could have learned informally – through relationships with people who had their own fibre practices. Having completed the program puts a recognizable credential on my CV, and it has helped me to frame my praxis in a way that is intelligible to funders and curators. It gave me access to a studio that I did not even know was possible, which allowed me to add to the technical aspects of my practice and helped me to determine what was needed to move me in the creative direction I was
interested to go.
Perhaps most importantly it gave me space, and space matters. On the one hand, the consideration of the physical space matters a great deal. As I outline in Chapter 2, I approach space as an element of my methodological framework. This is in line with a critical read on how space, and the programming that occurs in it, has historically informed the making and marketing of Deaf, disability, and mad art. But I also want to clarify that the space to which I refer here is not the physical space I could point to in regard to the studio, but the time to explore. This freedom to dedicate an entire semester to creative exploration was invaluable to my creative growth. While aesthetically I was turning to the things I knew for inspiration – artists,
movements, and struggles that I connected to over the years I had previously lived in Toronto – the Disability Studies Program in which I was and am enrolled is not currently resourced in a way to support or even encourage this type of creative practice. The more that research-creation is being integrated into various humanities programs, the more I am hopeful that studio-based researchers will be supported in this element of their work. However, on this matter, it should be noted that my fears are as follows: in the same way that the art program was not able to hold
space for the theoretical and political underpinnings of my aesthetic exploration, I fear that in the ways that we are institutionalizing research-creation in humanities programs, the technical and aesthetic elements of our theoretical exploration are not being adequately supported. I see these fears as materializing through the lack of availability of practicing artists to supervise students doing research-creation, my perception of the increase of tenured faculty with no previous art practice taking up research-creation as a primary element of their research programs, and an ongoing support of arts-based research projects that simply perpetuates the folding in of creative work to enhance, innovate, or translate dominant research paradigms.