Mainframe Resident Artist Jane Walker, March to July 2023

Our second Mainframe resident artist starting in March, is Jane Walker!

Jane Walker is a visual artist, art writer, and community organizer based in Bonavista, NL. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Visual Arts (2015) from Grenfell Campus, Memorial University and a Masters of Research with Distinction from The Glasgow School of Art (2017), where she studied rural art supports in Scotland and Newfoundland.

Jane works in a variety of media and has shared her work in exhibitions, publications, and talks in Canada, the UK, Iceland, Ireland, France, and Singapore. She worked with a small team to establish Union House Arts, an artist-run-centre on the Bonavista Peninsula (2017-2022) and has since worked with various other arts organizations in the province, including Bonavista Biennale, Riddle Fence, and Business and Arts NL.

She has participated in artist residencies with Workhouse Union (Callan, IRE 2016), The Bothy Project (Isle of Eigg, UK 2018), Live Textiles (Katalisk, Ktaqmkuk 2022), and most recently, the Ós Residency at the Icelandic Textile Centre (Blönduós, ICE 2023).

Jane is completing a low-residency, via distance, with us from March 10th to July as we work to prepare and train on the digital loom. The digital jacquard loom is located in Corner Brook. Stay tuned for more updates!

About Jane’s current project:

Right now, in my practice, I am very interested in slow tech, a concept that I have been exploring through an ongoing digital project with the Grenfell Art Gallery, onthemiddleofnowhere.ca. The project encourages the visitor to slow down, with simple imagery, nostalgic clickables, and gentle storytelling.

What appeals to me about introducing digital looms to my weaving practice, is that while the imaging technology is advanced, the loom still enables the weaver to build the cloth manually, pick by pick. Incorporating my analogue photography practice into my cloth drafts, something I would love to explore through TC2 technology, combining advanced and analogue methods. More generally, I want to continue experimenting with intentional slow tech in my practice. Concepts that I want to explore further include using advanced textile technology to make one-of-a-kind cloth (not multiples), continuing my experiments with embedding drawing into cloth, preparing digital cloth drafts of my analogue photographs (combining slow tech), integrating my various media (textiles, photography, drawing/painting), and from a technical standpoint, understanding how to use a TC2 digital loom.