FEMILIAR

2001-2003

Femiliar is a body of work that employs traditional textile techniques to interrogate notions of “women’s work,” femininity, gender identity, and cultural taboo. Using human hair as a primary fibre, the works reconfigure garments, domestic objects, and textile forms as charged artifacts, positioning the female body as both subject and site of inquiry. Through processes of weaving, spinning, stitching, and embellishment, textile practice becomes a subversive language—one that exposes how cultural perceptions of the body, particularly hair and blood, shape identity and regulate boundaries of propriety, sexuality, and selfhood. The works draw attention to the ways in which domestic labour and material culture encode narratives of control, inheritance, and transformation within feminine experience.

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The project comprises a series of works that operate across installation, garment, and object:

Bloodline | A computer-loom woven Bronson lace banner with embedded structural text, dyed with menstrual blood and cross-stitched with human hair. The names of the artist’s maternal lineage—grandmother, great-grandmother, and great-great-grandmother—are inscribed into the fabric. The full installation includes an ironing board and a wall shelf displaying vintage family photographs. (135" full length)

Matrimonial Bedsheets | A triptych of full-sized handwoven bedsheets incorporating a central slit, referencing orthodox dowry traditions in which consummation occurs through mediated contact. Each sheet progressively reveals what is culturally concealed, using doubleweave structures, machine embroidery, and embellishments of silk, tulle, human hair, and menstrual blood.

Dreaded Corps Baleine | Handspun human hair yarn and dreadlocks woven into a striped cloth and constructed into a corduroy-lined corset, laced with a hair rope. The work engages the corset as both disciplinary structure and site of transformation.

Pubescence | A found slip and undergarment ensemble incorporating couched human hair, menstrual-stained minipads, and vintage materials, addressing the thresholds of bodily development, visibility, and taboo.

Mourning Bonnet | Handspun human hair crocheted into a replica 19th-century mourning bonnet, based on an artifact from the York Sunbury Museum. The work invokes traditions of grief, memorialization, and the preservation of bodily trace, in the tradition of Victorian hair work.

Bloomers | Crocheted from handspun human hair and silk, these undergarments evoke historical femininity while subverting innocence through material and context.

Obstetricks | A metallic double-weave sculpture of woven raffia and steel, forming a bleeding uterus. The work confronts medical and cultural constructions of the female body, where care, control, and violence intersect.

Hair Pie | A sculptural object consisting of a freshly baked pie filled with human hair, with hair embedded into the crust, presented on a glass stand atop a crocheted silk and hair doily. The work engages domestic craft, consumption, and abjection. "Hair Pie" references slang terminology for the female pubic region.

 

Femiliar has been presented in numerous solo and group exhibitions, performed in festival contexts, and discussed extensively in publications, including its feature in Intertwined: The Art of Handspun Yarn, Modern Patterns, and Creative Spinning by Lexi Boeger (Quarry Books, 2008). The work was funded through several scholarships and notable awards administered through the New Brunswick College of Craft and Design, and developed as a body of work through curatorial mentorship at the University of New Brunswick Art Centre.