Hooking Goes Pop: Contemporary Rug Hooking
This exhibition brings together two visual artists (Rose Wilson and Terri Whetstone) working with rug hooking, exploring contemporary approaches through technique, materials, and personal narrative as subject matter.
Rug hooking, and fibre arts in general, has seen a surge in popularity in recent years, driven by people’s search for activities during the Covid pandemic and also by the development of new tools and novel materials. This exhibition highlights the emergence of new themes and ideas being expressed through rug hooking that go beyond the traditional motifs so often seen in our community. It seeks to encourage individual exploration of the medium as a form of self-expression and narrative (pictorial) story-telling.
The exhibition comprises both graphic and text-based work, which compliment each other in their wry humour while riffing on mass culture. The work can be considered contemporary Pop Art in both its content and its visual impact; and thoroughly Post-Modern in its tongue-in-cheek, confrontational self-awareness of style. Rose’s work is reminiscent of both tattoo art and comic book illustration, while Terri’s text-based work with stylized consideration for the “right” font to match the word plays with expectations of appropriate language and the written word.
The exhibition concept and curation is Terri Whetstone’s. Terri is a visual artist, former arts administrator, and arts volunteer. Although she has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions this is her first time curating an exhibition. Terri’s motivation to present this exhibition arises from her passion to share innovative and exciting approaches that utilize rug hooking as a contemporary art form with her community, with the hopes of fostering the enthusiasm she and the second artist, Rose Wilson, feel for the medium.
Terri hopes the exhibition will inspire others to approach rug hooking in ways that push boundaries and move this traditional craft beyond the use of commercial and repeated patterns, to a contemporary, creative exploration of the personal and the political in artmaking.
