Since 1989, Kathryn Walter has explored the intersection between visual art, material culture and the built environment. In 2000 she founded the FELT studio as a laboratory to explore the material and culture of modern industrial felt through exhibitions, historical research, architectural commissions and a product line. Her work ranges from formal investigations to projects engaged in humour and contradiction.
Walter’s work tends to evolve from limits she sets for herself such as using only squares or rectangles, or working only with grey tones. And, over the past few years, she has created a series of projects from remnants and offcuts of felt gathered from her studio production.
Her work has been included in exhibitions at the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum and Felissimo Design House in New York; The Royal Ontario Museum, The Design Exchange and Harbourfront in Toronto; and has been commissioned for numerous commercial sites and private residences in Canada and the United States.
Her work currently on view at TAP is called “Red Lilies” a wall piece made up of circles and squares of industrial felt in an organic arrangement held together with straight pins, making it at once appealing and forbidding, delicate and sinister. The structure appears fragile but is remarkably strong as the pins pierce the thick felt at numerous angles. Walter’s work is a study in contrasts with shapes at once fibrous and organic, hard edge and geometric. Repetition and pattern is applied to handmade production. Pieces folded and stitched look carved in relief, seaming simultaneously soft like wool and hard like stone.
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