April 02 – April 26, 2026
Opening Reception: Saturday, April 4, 2pm – 4pm
In the Main Gallery
CARLYN YANDLE | Joyful Making in Perilous Times
Large scale fibre art pieces connect domestic rote hand-making methods with abject materials, issues of personal wellness, and social engagement. Grappling with critical environmental, political, and social issues, and offering possibilities for different futures, Yandle creates her pieces over the course of months or years, beginning as an impulse to engage the hands instead of wringing them and to gather up the lost and unwanted to achieve a new whole. Each project entangles traditional fibre art methods with stuff that is thrown away but is never gone. As each concept grows, connections are forged with others in the gathering of materials and often in the hand-making, making community engagement an essential part of Yandle’s art practice. It is there in the macramé tapestry composed of construction-site debris; in the sprawling, undulating field of braided throwaway jeans; in bound sculptures of plastic fragments plucked from foreshores and landfills; and in a crocheted mass of disintegrated tarp yarded out from a forest.
Vancouver based artist Carlyn Yandle’s art practice interweaves a childhood steeped in West Coast counter-culture, a range of skills in traditional craft methods and her previous profession as a city newspaper journalist.For Yandle, working with her hands is a coping mechanism, a practical skill, a meditation, an endurance, a form of self-expression, a way to socialize and engage with the world, and an incubator for new ideas. Yandle holds a Bachelors of Fine Arts and a Masters of Fine Arts from Emily Carr University, as well as a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Victoria and a Certificate in Print Journalism from Langara College. She has exhibited her work in both solo and group exhibitions throughout British Columbia.
Join us on April 11th 2pm – 3pm for a free Artist Talk with Carlyn Yandle and CBC’s Early Edition host Stephen Quinn, and on April 22nd 1pm – 3pm for a free Community Stitch Session with Carlyn Yandle.
