hands holding, holding held. - Sal Lovink McKinnell

hands holding,

holding, held.

was a tactile exhibition staged at the Ignite Gallery, Toronto, from April 2-8, 2024. It featured 12 handwoven textile works.

close up of piece titled sisters not twins, a double weave check handwoven piece in bamboo and mohair. There are 4 squares and the colours are royal blue, green, and white.

View of the work muppet. On the wall there is a fuzzy handwoven piece with stripes in green and blue. To the left of the work, on a white plinth, there is a plastic yellow hairbrush.

side view of two handwoven pieces of corduroy mounted on bent plastic. The base fabric is dark blue with yellow ridges running horizontally over the piece.

view of work titled big bird. Is it small, the size of your hand and has a long string hanging from the right side. It is bright yellow and fluffy in texture.

view of a large wooden plywood bench with a handwoven top. The cushion is a pale yellow and the plywood is a pale colour.

piece called tic tac toe, it has a long twisted fringe has an optical pattern made up of squares in different sizes. It has lots of stripping in different colours, one group is yellow and orange and the other is blue and purple

two pieces both orange and purple in colour. The one on the wall has an optical pattern and is a mounted rectangle. The one on the ground is a large cushion with a block pattern shifted between orange and purple.

Exhibition Text

hands holding,

holding, held.

is the exploration in an understanding that to view textiles is not enough, I want an embodied sensorial experience that encompasses the depth that our senses hold. This way of thinking and creating priorities the enmeshing/enfolding/overlapping of the senses and is foundational to how I create. I aim to illustrate the value of touch and the ways that physical interaction with work changes its relationship with you the viewer/toucher/perceiver. I hope this show will allow for the investigation of the sense of touch outside of the skin.

All the works presented are handwoven and play with a logic, a

soft felt logic, I have been developing. It is the logic I employ when I weave, thinking about the entirety of a work, and one I am asking others to employ when interacting(touching/seeing/feeling/being/playing) with my work. a soft felt logic of object orientation, is grounded in the 'felt' experience. Felt is an important word for me. I like its applicability to a variety of instances. I'm considering the felt' hand - the skin it touches. Felt like the textile - a cohesive coalescence, and the emotive relation of 'felt' being the past tenses of feel - the emotional tie the word carries. I incorporate in a 'soft logic,' a logic presented by Pennina Barnett that asks, "What if the poetics of cloth were composed of" soft logics', modes of thought that twist and turn and stretch and fold? And in this movement, new encounters were made, beyond the constraint of binaries?" Together a soft felt logic is asking to be held.

Pennina Barnett, "Folds, Fragments, Surfaces: Towards a Poetics of Cloth." The Textile Reader, edited by Jessica Hemmings (London: Berg Publishers, 2012), 183.