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The LAB 3.4: Ann Newdigate Familiars

Ann Newdigate is celebrated as an artist, educator, lecturer, adjudicator, mentor and writer who has exhibited in solo and group-curated shows in Canada, USA, Australia, France, Germany, Norway, England and Scotland. She represented Canada in the 1994 Lodz Biennial (Poland). Her work deals with notions of value and authority by moving through digital, textile, and manual processes as strategies for conveying contradictions. She is internationally known for her textile work and her role in having tapestry recognized as an expressive contemporary art form.

Familiars reflects simultaneously on the past and the future, presenting a series of miniature tapestry portraits accompanied by a perimeter “wainscotting” of text referencing illuminated medieval manuscripts with enlarged decorative capitals. The text is comprised of woven and digitally scanned letters which reference a parable of life’s ambivalent journey and draws on aspects of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. “Familiars is a term that emerges from the shady realities of the non-verbal, or unsayable,” Newdigate comments. “Its numerous meanings are mediated according to who one is, or is not?in the same way [that] interpretations of various histories are consistent with differing perspectives…” The installation also includes related material from our permanent collection.