Artist of the Month Tina Struthers

i: Artist of the Month

Tina Struthers

Tina Struthers is a Canadian textile and visual artist, born in Cape Town South Africa, now living and working in Montreal, Canada. She creates large-scale textile abstractions to map the unpredictability of humanity’s impact on global societies and environments. Combining fibre and textile elements, with a focus on detailed, hand-stitched surface textures, her works engage such themes such as multiculturalism, displacement, movement, momentum and change. Her work has been exhibited regionally, nationally and internationally, and she has been selected for various international textile art biennales, most notably the 2017 and 2019 KPS International Textile Biennial in Belgium, and the World Textile Art Organization’s 7 th International Contemporary Textile Art, in Uruguay, where she received a mention of honour. Her work has also been exhibited in the United States, Ukraine, South Korea, South Africa, Slovenia and Spain. She has presented at various conferences nationally and internationally, most recently at the 2019 World Textile Art Biennial in Madrid, and at Contextile in Portugal. The mask that graces our cover— ‘Harnessing the Power of Fear’ — won Fiber Art Fever’s art mask competition, 2020. Tina’s artistic practice includes cultural mediation projects within the greater Montreal region, and a number of public art commissions. She is currently working on her MFA in Fibre and Material Practices at Concordia University, Montreal.

Tina writes: When you are born you inhale, and when you die you exhale… in between is the unfolding physical metamorphosis of our life. Growing from infant to adult, collecting scars, wrinkles and markings like a patina, we tread new ground and occasionally revisit old spaces. We change, we become, we evolve. Our constant connection with our exterior surroundings through breath forms the basis of ‘Breathless’— my artistic exploration of illness and imprisonment in the body. I am exploring both the inhalation of freedom in mediative conscious breathing, but also the invisible and invasive limitations of breathlessness and illness.

In this way, I am interested in uncovering the role of conscious breath, mindfulness, and connection with our environment in the process of healing. In the practice of my creative investigation— through touch, connection with matter, repetitive actions, and slow stitching —I am slowing down the breath and heart rate. It’s a physical action of stitching and mending the self, allowing the body to slow and heal. I am imagining our bodies existing simply in breath, visualizing the lungs in abstraction, mutating beyond human physical restrictions.

These works fold in uncomfortable twists, mutating, challenging our reality, gasping for breath. Stitched surface textures, beads and embroidery draw the viewer in, and evoke the desire to touch… only to realize that what they have just touched may represent, for example, cancer cells. The goal is to create comfort and discomfort for the viewer. I have created a sonic backdrop of conscious breathing and breathlessness for installations of the pieces, suggesting a moment to consider the air and atmosphere that we share.

You can find Tina on Instagram: @tinastruthers and on Facebook, Tina M. Struthers She is currently showing at the BIEN Bieniale in Slovenia.