For Panya Clark Espinal, weaving is a conduit for collaboration and for thinking with others across time. In this body of work, she engages the paintings and legacy of her grandmother, the artist Paraskeva Clark (1898–1986). Panya’s relationship with the canvases her grandmother created, which have remained in the family’s collection, is complex. She understands them not simply as images to be preserved, but as material to be activated, folded, and re‑threaded into the present. Textiles here are material, concept, architecture and language.
In Blood and Freedom (The Provocateur) (2024), handwoven doubleweave cloth and domestic elements knot together to allude to contradictions: Paraskeva’s radical spirit, the opportunities opened by the Russian revolution, and the later constraints of Canadian respectability. Red and white echo chromatic tensions while also recalling Eastern European embroidery traditions in which geometric patterns can be read as a kind of code written by women. The woven structures in Blood and Freedom similarly operate as quiet text. The patterns carry stories even as the weave is pulled to its limits: threads slip, edges begin to fray, and the fabric hints at rupture and contradiction within an otherwise coherent pattern.
Throughout, fraying is less failure than revelation; it is a way of showing construction and contingency. Clark Espinal’s work holds what has passed through hands across generations: encounters, inheritances, and interruptions that settle into the fabric as memory. These pieces are “textiling”[1] of relations, in dialogue with a wider circle of collaborators, that shifts weaving towards a socially engaged, world-making practice.
The exhibition culminates in I am Your Window (The Elements of a Performance) (2024), where fabric, sculpture (form), and projection investigate Paraskeva’s abstract depiction of her kitchen cupboards and the creative licence she took to engage us.
– Michelle Gewurtz
Michelle Gewurtz is the Supervisor of Arts & Culture, and lead curator at the Peel Art Gallery, Museum and Archives (PAMA). An accomplished curator and art historian, she has developed and organized numerous contemporary art exhibitions across Canada and internationally. From 2015 to 2020, she served as Senior Curator at the Ottawa Art Gallery (OAG). Michelle holds a Ph.D. in Art History from the University of Leeds. Her curatorial practice examines the intersections of gender politics and creative identity. Most recently, she curated “the stories we share are the light we carry,” the first solo exhibition of works by artist Debbie Ebanks.
[1] A term used by Catherine Dormer, author of A Philosophy of Textile: Between Practice and Theory, 2022. Dormor argues that “textiling” brings different ways of knowing into relation and figures world-making as interweaving threads.
The artist would like to acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts.
About the Artist
Panya Clark Espinal is a Canadian artist whose 35-year practice has explored mechanisms of representation and their influence on perception. She has attempted to bridge a gap between the world as seen in images and that of tangible experience. Through site-specific installations, exhibitions and public commissions, her work has focused on bringing renewed intimacy to the act of looking while exploring questions of reproduction, perspective, and physicality.
Clark Espinal’s solo exhibitions include the Künstlerhaus Bethanien (Berlin), the Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto), the Canadian Embassy (Tokyo), the McMichael Canadian Art Collection (Kleinburg), the National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa), the Oakville Galleries (Oakville), and the Southern Alberta Art Gallery (Lethbridge). She has also exhibited in England, Italy, and Spain. As an active producer of public art commissions, she has created pieces for such prominent organizations as the Toronto Transit Commission, City of Mississauga, BMO, and Covenant House. Her work is included in private and public collections, including the National Gallery of Canada.