The Chisel and the Oak Beam

Group exhibition "The Chisel and the Oak Beam" considers a duality in the practices of four artists including AUArts Alum eva birhanu, BFA '20, Fibre.

"The Chisel and the Oak Beam" is a group exhibition that considers a duality in the practices of four artists including Alum eva birhanu, BFA '20, Fibre, Lauren Chipeur, Star Crop Eared Wolf, and Grace Wirzba based in Treaty 7 Territory of Southern Alberta.

Each artist reckons with how their respective medium of weaving, ceramics, beading, and textiles is shaped by its own material history while contemplating the colonial, patriarchal, and ecological issues surrounding their respective materials.

The artists processes of making are not only concerned with changing raw material into something beautiful or useful but question assumptions around issues such as the femininity of domestic textiles or the ecological toll from harvesting raw materials. Not only does each artist refashion material from one state to another, but they carve away at the assumptions associated with each medium, all with some new potential being born of it.