SLOW PRACTICE
7 - 17 May 2024 | Vancouver Arts Centre
 
An exhibition and interactive community stitching project by Vancouver Arts Centre’s current Artist in Resident Annette Nykiel.
 
Annette Nykiel has been cultivating slow-making around Albany as part of her artist residency. Cultivating slow-making is an ongoing process of nurturing engagement with people, materials and skills. This process is grounded in connection—sharing and encouraging the complex relationships between people, plants, animals and the soils that sustain all of us on Earth. The emerging body of work in this exhibition continues an exchange of ideas and knowledge, materials, technical skills, and scientific inquiry while encouraging long term relationships to place.
 
The community is invited to add to a few stitches (or many) or a patch or two to a work being pieced together during the open studio days on Tuesdays, and continued during the exhibition. This piece will be curated as part of the exhibition to blur boundaries between art, process and making and raise questions about our entanglement in our environment.
 
Vancouver Arts Centre
Tuesday 7 May – Friday 17 May 2024
Gallery open Monday – Friday, 10am - 4pm
 
Join us at the VAC from 11am, Tuesday 14th May for an artist talk with Annette Nykiel.

Annette Nykiel is a slow-maker and artist-researcher with a keen interest in materiality and non-human agency of non-urban spaces. Her geoscientist background deeply influences her slow-making process, as she attentively observes, gathers, and wanders in the natural surroundings. Nykiel contemplates the fragility of soils and the interconnectedness of ecological systems. As a fibre/textile artist, she crafts textiles and vessels using repurposed cloth, bush dyes, and hand-stitching and basketry techniques. Working across urban and regional areas, she shares her skills as an artsworker, workshop facilitator, art project manager, and occasional academic. Nykiel's evolving practice encompasses solo and group exhibitions, residencies, and the artist collective UnderFOOT. Her work is held in public collections in WA and Queensland.