Indigenous 
A series of artist’s books in fabric with poems about textiles, tools and makers, exploring book-structures and textile techniques.
Exhibition Date: January 25 – March 21, 2025
Reception: Saturday, February 15, 1 pm – 3 pm
About the Artist:
Lise Melhorn-Boe has been making and exhibiting books and sculptural bookworks for over forty years. She studied at Carleton University and the University of Guelph and received M.A. and M.F.A. degrees from Wayne State University in Detroit. Melhorn-Boe has exhibited widely across Canada and the United States as well as Europe and South America. She has had solo exhibitions at many galleries in Ontario, as well as in Alberta and British Columbia. Her work is in public and university collections including the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Canada Council Art Bank, Library and Archives Canada, the National Gallery in Ottawa, the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Tate London.
Melhorn-Boe now lives in Kingston, Ontario.
Website: https://lisemelhornboe.ca/
About the exhibition:
In her work, Lise Melhorn-Boe has generally worked thematically, exploring issues like women's body image, socialization of children, women's roles in our society, and how what we do to our environment affects our collective health—all from a feminist perspective. Often her artist’s books have been made of paper, but because of her background in textiles, she has also incorporated fabric or clothing in her work. Generally the shape of the book has reflected its content; she has used a variety of materials appropriate to the content.
This current body of work focusses on textiles themselves. Melhorn-Boe has searched for poetry about needlework or the tools that are used, creating fabric books which explore book structures usually only created in paper, as well as developing new structures. She is challenging herself to explore a variety of textile techniques—some of which she is familiar, and others, like needlepoint and how to create pleats, which were new to her. Next up is an exploration of e-textiles!
