Open Collections

Kindsfather, Erika

University of British Columbia

This thesis is the first critical engagement with the status of textile media and creative techniques in Vancouver’s artistic environment during the 1960s and 1970s. Specifically, I examine the ways that artist Evelyn Roth developed the categories of wearable art and moving sculpture within this creative milieu. Roth intertwined textile-based material practices, dance and performance as a member of the arts organization Intermedia and dancer in the performance group TheCo. While textile media and techniques have been historically relegated to the margins of art history, systematically devalued as “craft” and excluded from dominant discourse for their associations with femininity, domesticity, and gendered labor, Roth and collaborating artists destabilized the foundation of this narrative as they explored textile-based practices in Vancouver’s Intermedia scene. Motivated by utopic social politics and the effects of media in everyday life, the artists working within Intermedia challenged hierarchies of materials and notions of individual artistic authorship, centering collaboration, experimentation, and interdisciplinary approaches to new and “everyday” media forms in their artistic endeavors. Elaborating her interdisciplinary practice within this space of alternative artistic activity, Roth asserted the cultural significations of media forms and creative strategies traditionally excluded from arts spaces. How does her practice generate thought around the potential of textile media to counter oppressive social structures and create change in the experience of everyday life? Intertwining feminist and formalist methodologies, I approach this study with a lens towards the relationship of material and ideological forms in the constitution of identity, space, and social relations. Bridging material practices and social dynamics through her experiments with wearable art, moving sculpture, and community participation, Roth illuminates the potential to transform social conventions through alternative creative strategies. I argue that Roth’s use of accessible materials, performance, and strategies of community engagement situate textile media within a politics of transformation, capable of generating change in normative articulations of space and giving way to new social possibilities. I address how she orients the material and conceptual malleability of textiles towards the articulation of alternative social values, propelling thought around the potential to act outside of the constraints of dominant social order.

Text

2023-09-30

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/79618

Art History

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/