The Textile Museum of Canada is pleased to present Lyn Carter: 11th Line (October 21, 2015 – March 20, 2016) featuring new site specific work by the senior Canadian artist. Throughout her practice, she has transformed intricate textile surfaces into fantastic sculptural installations and patterned architectural forms inspired by simple everyday objects. In 11th Line, Carter moves beyond domestic space to investigate an expanded personal topography. Titled after the name of the rural road the artist lives on, the exhibition explores the poetics of place and personal meaning, tracing daily trajectories through familiar terrain in forms invested with concrete autobiographical references and the abstract qualities of pattern play.

As the geography of the 11th Line becomes a lens for a deep connection to place, Carter explores one of the most fundamental textile design elements – the stripe – and its graphic interplay with familiar landscapes and their visible horizons, road grids, power lines and furrowed fields. Integrating historical artifacts from the Museum’s collection that highlight the spatial organization of lines and stripes in textile design, her own highly crafted sewn sculptures, drawings on paper, digitally printed fabric and video interventions are poetic translations of the rhythms and patterns of local landscapes and vernacular architecture – tents, outbuildings, canopies and cabanas.

This exhibition also marks the premiere of Refrain, a video collaboration between Lyn Carter and Icelandic artist Sigrún Hardardóttir that grew out of Carter’s 2011 artist residency in Reykjavik, Iceland. Here, the surrounding landscape – with its lava fields, volcanos and glaciers – is a dramatic backdrop to the rural farmsteads nearby. Refrain was completed in 2014 when the artists travelled to a number of local natural sites, capturing footage of the majestic Seljalandsfoss waterfalls.

11th Line is curated by Sarah Quinton and organized by the Textile Museum of Canada with the generous support of the Anne Angus Contemporary Program Fund. Lyn Carter would like to acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for the development of the exhibition.

With a studio practice that spans over 30 years, Lyn Carter has exhibited extensively in galleries and museums across Canada and internationally. Her work is represented in a number of permanent collections, including the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, U.S.A., Cambridge Galleries, Ontario and the Dalhousie Art Gallery in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Lyn Carter teaches sculpture in the Art & Art History Program, a collaborative Honours B.A. program between Sheridan College and the University of Toronto Mississauga.

Sigrún Hardardóttir is a multidisciplinary artist based in Reykjavik, Iceland. She has exhibited in galleries and museums internationally, and her work is represented in private and public collections including The Art Gallery of Iceland, Reykjavik Art Museum, Kopavogur Art Museum and NIMK – the Netherland Media Institute. Hardardóttir has taught at the Iceland Academy of the Arts, Borgarholtsskóli, and the University of Quebec in Montreal.