Exhibition – The Craft of Spirit: BC Liturgical Textiles

Textile has always served as a metaphor for the intangible and unknown aspects of human existence. Referred to as the veil, it is conceptualized as the gauzy and semi-opaque liminal barrier separating the physical world and the dimension of the spirit.  Whether it is the temple curtain suspiciously torn at the moment of Jesus’ death; the pervasive presence of the veil in dream imagery as described by the father of psychology Carl Jung, or holy relics carefully enshrined in glass preserving scraps of fabrics worn by miracle performing saints’, textile has never been far from the collective unconscious as a symbol of the mysterious. While spiritual textiles embody our relationship to the ephemeral, this exhibition also seeks to prove that it has the capacity to a keen sensibility of the temporal, representing the immediacy of time and place. This exhibition traces the creation of liturgical textile in BC from 1924 to 2024, and through it demonstrates that the imagery, design, and even the very fibers utilized in our spiritual rituals speak to our hopes for society in the future, while continuing to pay respect to geography on which we are grounded.