About —
Titled after the rural road where Lyn Carter lives and works, 11th Line explores one of the most fundamental textile design elements – the stripe – and its graphic relationship to natural and built landscapes. Carter’s highly crafted sewn sculptures, drawings on paper and digitally printed fabric are poetic translations of the rhythms and patterns of personal space and vernacular architectures that are part of her daily experience. In preparation for this exhibition, the artist researched a range of textiles from the Textile Museum of Canada’s international collection that highlight the complex spatial organization of lines, bands and stripes.
Lyn Carter’s processes and materials are varied and without limits. She combines handwork with digital scanning and printing to render multifaceted elements – from 3D printed plastics that are scale model stand-ins for site-specific sculptures, to delicate drawings that are digitally translated onto large scale, industrially manufactured textiles. These digital applications and sophisticated output systems are modes of visual and physical translation that are at ease with the artist’s manual processes of drawing and sculpting – skills that are core to her practice.
Of course it is not only in the visual arts that new technologies are merging with longstanding hand skills and processes, extending human labour and imagination: plowed rows in a farm field are increasingly worked by tractors equipped with GPS (Global Positioning System) devices, offering unprecedented precision and efficiencies. It is the lines of these extraordinarily even furrows, ubiquitous in her rural environs, along with soft field edges and meandering road grids that inspire and inform her fluid images of the striped landscape.
With a practice that spans over 30 years, Lyn Carter’s work combines art and craft, site-specificity and sculptural form to fashion new imaginative terrain. She has exhibited extensively in galleries and museums across Canada and internationally and is represented in public and private collections throughout North America.
The exhibition is organized by the Textile Museum of Toronto with the support of the Anne Angus Contemporary Program Fund.
Read an Essay on Lyn Carter by Peter Legris – “What is the meaning of Lyn Carter’s stripes?” (2018).
Biography —
Lyn Carter is an artist based near Grand Valley, Ontario. Born in Toronto in 1954, she graduated with an AOCA from the Ontario College of Art in 1978 and York University (MFA) in 1994. Lyn has exhibited across Canada, the U.S.A., Australia, Britain, Spain, Mexico and China. In 2008 she was commissioned to create a major site-specific work for the Third Guangzhou Triennial in Guangzhou, China. Most recently she was invited to exhibit in the Hangzhou Triennial of Fiber Art 2016, Zhejiang Art Museum, Hangzhou, China. Lyn Carter teaches sculpture in the Art and Art History Program, a joint program between Sheridan College and the University of Toronto Mississauga.